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LAHORE, Pakistan: Pakistan on Tuesday questioned four suspects including an Afghan captured during a police academy siege that has fanned Western fears about the menace of extremism in the nuclear-armed state.
Attackers armed with guns, grenades and suicide vests stormed the training centre near Pakistan's cultural capital Lahore, unleashing eight hours of gun battles until they were overpowered by security forces.
Seven police cadets, a civilian and four attackers died in the second gun assault in Lahore this month, sparking fears that violence is seeping out of the tribal badlands on the Afghan border and into the heart of Pakistan.
Such is the scale of unrest in the frontline state of the "war on terror" that US President Barack Obama called Al-Qaeda and its allies "a cancer that risks killing Pakistan" and urged Islamabad to eradicate extremists.
"Police and other intelligence agencies are interrogating the suspects. We cannot say anything for now about which group is involved," Lahore city police chief Habib-ur Rehman told AFP.
Authorities have spearheaded a top-level investigation, with the chief suspects either homegrown Islamist groups or Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants holed up in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.
Interior ministry chief Rehman Malik talked about possible "foreign hands". The attack took place near the border with Pakistan's arch-rival India.
"Terrorists are coming from FATA (the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas). They get help from across the border," he said. "Where do they get weapons and new vehicles?"
Mourners gathered for funeral prayers for seven of the dead at a police building in downtown Lahore on Tuesday. The coffins, wrapped in Pakistani flags and sheets inscribed with Koranic verses, were lined up under a canopy.
Police, who have been widely criticised as the "soft" target for extremists attacking the security forces in Pakistan, enforced heavy security for the funerals and armed commandos deployed on rooftops around the building.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband condemned the attack and pledged international help to root out the extremist threat.
"The attack is yet another reminder of the threat that Pakistan faces from violent extremism," he said.
"It is a threat that the international community must help Pakistan to tackle, in the interests both of Pakistan's people and of wider stability."
Police instructor Mohammad Iqbal, lying in hospital with head and spinal injuries, speculated that the attack was to avenge a Pakistani security operation against radicals holed up in an Islamabad mosque in July 2007.
"What I vividly remember is that they kept hurling grenades and fired from the second floor of the building where they later got trapped, and every time they shouted Allahu akbar (God is greater)," he told AFP.
“My hunch is they took revenge on us for the Red Mosque operation."
Basharat Ali, with a swollen, fractured leg and on a drip, said he was proud to be a policeman despite what he called "the worst day of my life".
"I saw many of my colleagues wounded. I also saw a policeman who died on the spot. There were three or four people who were throwing grenades and firing at policemen. They were running here and there like shadows," he said.
The Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives, a non-governmental group, said Monday's attack - just weeks after the attack in the same city on the Sri Lankan cricket team - underscored the urgent need to strengthen the police.
"Had the perpetrators of the attack on the Sri Lankan team been arrested, this incident of violence might not have taken place," it said.
"The cancer of terrorism is fast spreading and remedial measures need to be taken on a war-footing," the centre added.
Pakistan, under US pressure to eliminate extremists, denied that there was another breakdown in security, four weeks after gunmen ambushed the Sri Lankan cricket team, killing eight people before calmly walking off unchallenged.
Pakistani officials said that attack bore the hallmarks of the November 2008 siege in India's financial capital Mumbai, blamed on Pakistani militants, which killed 165 people.
Analysts said the latest attack was a firm message to Obama, who has put Pakistan at the heart of the fight against Al-Qaeda, tripling US aid in a strategy aimed at reversing the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
- AFP/yb
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