Pat Dollard

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Islamist militants behind a wave of recent attacks in Pakistan have changed tactics to target foreigners, officials said Sunday, after a bomb at an Islamabad restaurant killed a Turkish woman.

The Turkish aid worker died and at least 10 other foreigners were wounded, including several US diplomats, in the blast at the popular Luna Caprese Italian eatery in Islamabad on Saturday evening.

Violence linked to Al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents has left at least 600 people dead since the start of the year and posed a major challenge to the country’s incoming government after last month’s elections.

“This was the first attack in which foreigners have been targeted in Islamabad since 2002 and it shows a new trend,” a top security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

A suicide attacker armed with grenades stormed into a church in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave on March 17, 2002, killing a US diplomat’s wife and teenage stepdaughter as well as two other worshippers.

Attacks on western targets in Pakistan have been limited since then, with the last being a suicide car bombing in 2006 that killed a US diplomat outside the American consulate in the southern city of Karachi.

Most of the bombings in Pakistan over the past 14 months have targeted security forces or civilians.

Saturday’s attack, however, targeted a restaurant that is popular with westerners and serves alcohol — a rarity in this conservative Islamic republic.

“This restaurant carries the repute that foreigners come here because hard drinks are served with food. The fact that militants chose to strike the place on a weekend night shows that they had done their homework,” a senior security official involved in the investigation told AFP.

Islamabad police chief Shahid Nadeem Baluch said an improvised explosive device was used in the attack.

“We have not yet determined if it was thrown from outside or planted,” he said. “It was a soft target.”

Baluch would not say if foreigners were the intended target.

The senior security official said five to six kilogrammes (11-13 pounds) of explosives with pellets and ball bearings were used — a trademark of pro-Taliban militants blamed for several previous attacks.

“The terrorists picked up a soft target where they had prior information that some foreigners would be present at dinner time,” the official said.

“Investigating teams are working at the crime scene,” senior police official Kamran Adil told AFP.

He said it was too early to provide any details about the investigation but the findings would be provided in a later report.

A police spokesman said that 110 suspects had been rounded up in connection with the bombing in a series of raids in the capital.

Meanwhile Japan’s Kyodo News said its Islamabad bureau chief Motonobu Endo, 32, and former bureau chief Toshihisa Onishi, 34, were injured in the blast.

President Pervez Musharraf “strongly condemned” the bombing, the Associated Press of Pakistan said.

The attack will put pressure on Pakistan’s incoming coalition government, which is due to be sworn in on Monday.

The party of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who died on December 27 in a suicide attack in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, and the grouping of former premier Nawaz Sharif are set to form the government.

Their parties trounced the political supporters of Musharraf, a key US ally in the “war on terror” since he abandoned Pakistan’s support for Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in 2001.

The new parliament is set for a showdown with Musharraf after vowing to restore judges whom the president sacked in November but who could now overturn his victory in the October 2007 presidential election.

Pakistan has been rocked by a series of major attacks since the February 18 parliamentary elections.

Saturday’s blast came four days after two suicide bombs in the eastern city of Lahore, one of them targeting a police investigation headquarters, killed 27 people.