Suicide Bombing Kills 41 Troops at Pakistani Army Base

Attack Called Reprisal for Strike on School

Pakistan army troops gather at the spot where a suicide attacker detonated a bomb, at the Pakistan army's main training base, in Dargai, Pakistan, Wednesday, killing at least 35 soldiers as they started their calisthenics exercises, the military said. (M. Khan - AP)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov. 8 -- A suicide bomber detonated explosives on a field filled with army recruits doing exercises in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday morning, killing at least 41 soldiers and wounding dozens in one of the worst such attacks in Pakistan's recent history.

Officials immediately blamed the bombing on al-Qaeda and local Islamic extremists. They said it appeared to be an act of reprisal for a government missile attack Oct. 30 that killed 82 people at an Islamic school in the nearby Bajaur tribal region. Officials suspected that the school was being used as a training camp for guerrillas.

"It seems that this was linked to the action by our forces against militants in Bajaur last week. Al-Qaeda and its followers in this region are getting desperate because of our actions," Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said from Islamabad, the capital. "I am afraid this is a beginning of a new phase of terrorism in Pakistan. The terrorists are now pitched directly against our security forces."

Military officials said the bomber, wrapped in a cloak, wandered onto the unguarded training field and detonated explosives before anyone noticed him. They said a second intended suicide bomber escaped on a motorbike from the military training camp, located in Dargai village near the semiautonomous tribal areas that border eastern Afghanistan.

Several hours later, a man called the office of Geo television in Peshawar, the provincial capital of North-West Frontier Province. He identified himself as the second suicide bomber and claimed that the attack had been carried out by local insurgents from the Islamic Taliban movement, which operates on both sides of the border.

"Our martyr has clearly stated that this attack is our response to the Pakistan army attack in Bajaur," the caller said in Afghan Pashto, according to journalists at Geo. "This attack marks the end of our commitment not to target the Pakistan army. We have enrolled 275 people as suicide bombers, and now they will take revenge."

Dargai is a stronghold of a banned Islamic militant group, the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, which ran the religious school that was bombed by the military in Bajaur. The group has been fighting government troops in the tribal areas for months and was banned in 2002 after trying to impose Taliban-style rule in the tribal areas.

After Wednesday's attack, security was heightened at all military facilities in Pakistan and soldiers in the northwest region were told not to visit public places in uniform, a senior army official said. On Tuesday, the North-West Frontier provincial governor was forced to cut short a visit to the South Waziristan tribal area when two rockets were fired near a meeting he was attending with local elders.

The tribal areas are plagued by violence and Islamic extremism, and U.S. and Afghan officials believe both Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have taken refuge there. Recently the Pakistani government made two peace agreements in South and North Waziristan, hoping to end the conflict that has pitted Islamic insurgents against Pakistani troops on one side of the border and NATO and Afghan forces on the other. A third agreement was due to be signed in Bajaur last week.

But the Oct. 30 missile attack, which Pakistani officials said was based on U.S. intelligence and carried out by Pakistani forces, appears to have sabotaged that effort. News of the attack has convulsed the tribal region, with daily demonstrations taking place and local politicians resigning from parliament in protest.

According to Pakistani and U.S. officials, the Islamic school in Bajaur had been under suspicion for some time as a training place for insurgents, and there were reports of senior al-Qaeda figures visiting there.

Pakistani officials have strongly defended the attack and continued to assert responsibility for it despite widespread public protest. On Tuesday, the army's powerful corps commanders met with Pakistan's military president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and resolved to continue the campaign to free Pakistan from armed Islamic militancy, according to a military press statement.

But many Pakistanis in the volatile tribal region are convinced that the missile attack killed only innocent young religious students, that it was carried out by U.S. Predator drones and that U.S. officials pressured Pakistan into supporting it. U.S. officials have said the United States did not carry out the attack.

If it did, however, analysts said, that would mean Musharraf's government, already tarred as a U.S. puppet by many Pakistanis, chose the lesser evil of claiming it had carried out an attack that was bound to create enormous domestic anger, unleash the kind of violent reaction that occurred Wednesday and undermine a reconciliation policy it had worked hard to promote.

Sayed Sahibzada Haroon Rashid, a resident of Bajaur and member of the National Assembly from Pakistan's largest legal Islamic party, said in an interview Wednesday in Peshawar that he personally knew the names, relatives and tribes of most of the victims and that all were teenage students. He said a government list of purported national ID cards showing many to be in their 20s was a fabrication.

"This was not a training camp, it was a school where boys study the Koran. They didn't even find a knife," said Rashid, who reached the blast site within minutes and helped collect pieces of bodies. "We all recognized the American drone planes because they fly over every day. There was no al-Qaeda there; it was just an excuse to destroy our peace process. This will unite the whole country against the Musharraf dictatorship and America."

Khan reported from Karachi, Pakistan.