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PESHAWAR, Pakistan : Militants armed with guns and grenades stormed the offices of a US-based Christian charity in Pakistan Wednesday, killing up to five people and sparking clashes with police, officials said.
The gunmen attacked offices of World Vision near Oghi town, in the district of Mansehra in the troubled North West Frontier Province, where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants have carried out multiple attacks.
Police said five people were killed, including two women, but a spokesman for World Vision confirmed that four of its Pakistani staff died.
World Vision administration officer Mohammad Sajid told AFP that he was in the building when "more than 15 armed men" arrived in pick-up vehicles and stormed inside the offices.
"They gathered all of us in one room. The gunmen, some of whom had their faces covered, also snatched our mobile phones.
"They dragged people one by one and shifted to an adjacent room, and shot and killed them. We could see them firing," he said.
Rienk van Velzen, World Vision's regional communications director, told AFP by telephone from the Netherlands that all staff in the office were Pakistani.
"So far unfortunately four colleagues have been killed. A number of people are injured. I heard six, but that has not been confirmed by my colleagues... four local World Vision staff have been killed so far," he said.
The Christian charity has been operating in the area since October 2005, when a massive 7.6-magnitude earthquake killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5 million homeless in Pakistan's northwest.
Police said a band of militants opened fire and exploded hand grenades near Oghi, about 80 kilometres north of the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
"So far we have confirmation about the deaths of five people, including two women," senior police officer Waqar Ahmed told AFP, giving no further details.
An aid worker said the militants unleashed heavy gunfire, sparking a battle with police, who rushed to the site. Staff from the charity, which was founded in the United States, were trapped in the office.
World Vision's website describes the organisation as "a Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice".
It says the aid group is "inspired by our Christian values", but stresses that the organisation works with people of all faiths.
Foreign targets are rarely attacked directly in Pakistan, despite the chronic insecurity in the nuclear-armed state, which is a key ally in the US-led war on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.
A wave of suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan has killed more than 3,000 people since 2007. Blame has fallen on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants bitterly opposed to the alliance with the United States.
Four local staff with the British-run aid group Plan International were killed in a similar attack in Mansehra in February 2008, prompting some charities to withdraw their offices from the troubled area.
The Plan office was burned to the ground in the attack by gunmen who opened fire and hurled grenades, and the non-governmental organisation, which had been active in the area for 12 years, halted its operations in Pakistan.
On February 3, a bomb attack in the NWFP district of Lower Dir killed three American soldiers and five other people at the opening of a school just rebuilt with Western funding after an Islamist attack.
- AFP/ir
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