Church Killings Deal New Blow to Pakistan Chief

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —  A terrorist attack on a Roman Catholic church in eastern Pakistan left 15 worshipers and a security guard dead early Sunday, underscoring the deep domestic difficulties facing the government as it attempts to help the United States.

To some analysts, the attack appeared to be directed against the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf, which has come under pressure from large sectors of the public because of its support for the U.S. campaign against Afghanistan.

For a second day Sunday, thousands of Pakistani men were gathered at their country’s northwestern border with Afghanistan, waiting for an order from the Muslim leader who had summoned them there to cross it and join Taliban fighters.

Sunday’s massacre came after days of intense bombing along the front north of the Afghan capital, Kabul. B-1 and B-52 bombers blasted Taliban troops with dozens of 500-pound unguided bombs over the preceding 24 hours, U.S. defense officials said Sunday.

At the same time, reports out of Kabul said 13 civilians died as bombs or missiles hit homes in two residential areas of the city. Sunday was the second day in a row that U.S. strikes went awry and killed civilians.

The church attack took place in the Punjab province town of Bahawalpur as congregants were singing the final hymn of the Sunday service at St. Dominic’s church. The attackers, who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles, according to witnesses, took the lives of 15 worshipers--including the minister conducting the service--as well as the security guard. At least nine more people were wounded.

Although the shootings occurred in a Catholic church, the victims were Protestant members of an umbrella congregation that includes a number of Protestant faithful, among them Lutherans, Presbyterians and Anglicans. They have used the church because they are not numerous enough to have one of their own. Christians, the majority of them Catholic, make up less than 2% of this overwhelmingly Muslim country.

“We, as Christians, were feeling very safe and didn’t fear anything,” said Father James Channan, the Pakistani head of the Dominican order in Pakistan, which runs the church as well as a nearby school and hospital.

“But this has really come out of the blue, and we are shocked that it can happen, and we feel very insecure. People in our community are in deep shock--they are crying,” Channan said.

The assault has to be viewed as politically motivated and aimed at both undermining Musharraf and stoking domestic instability, said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of security studies at Quaid-i-Azam University, a semiautonomous institution in Islamabad, the capital.

“The timing is very significant. It is meant to show that the government is not in control and to say, ‘If we can’t kill Americans, we will kill Christians, the people of their faith,’ ” Hussain said.

“And it is aimed at eroding the newfound relationship between Pakistan and the United States. It comes at a bad time for the Musharraf government, which is facing a very vocal dissent and with a situation along the Afghanistan border that is very volatile,” he said.

Musharraf sharply condemned the killers, saying that “the methods used and inhuman tactics employed clearly indicate the involvement of trained terrorists of organizations bent upon creating discord and disharmony in Pakistan.”

“It saddens me deeply, and my heart goes out to the victims and their families,” a deeply sober Musharraf said.

Without naming India or Afghanistan, government security officials said they had not ruled out the possibility that the attack was the work of forces from outside Pakistan.

At a meeting late Sunday, the chiefs of government intelligence and security agencies decided to increase surveillance of all suspected militant religious groups in the country. Security forces also will ramp up security at all minority places of worship, including Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh and Shiite Muslim mosques.

In addition, there will be an effort to coordinate central and provincial anti-terrorism efforts under the aegis of the national crisis center, which is headed by a high-ranking military officer. That agency will create an information clearinghouse on the activities of suspected terrorist groups. And in the coming days, Musharraf will address the nation to unveil a national plan to deal with external terrorist threats.

Also Sunday, in the western province of Baluchistan, three people were killed and 17 injured when a bomb exploded on a municipal bus in Quetta. Two of the dead were soldiers. As with the church massacre, there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

Although Pakistan has a history of tolerance for Christians, the region surrounding Bahawalpur has been troubled by sectarian violence between Muslims who practice the moderate Shiite form of Islam and more conservative Sunnis and Wahhabis. Two radical groups are operating in the area, according to Hussain, who said that at least one is linked to a series of recent attacks on Iranian diplomats.

One of the groups, the Soldiers of Muhammad, has been campaigning against the Musharraf government’s effort to put some limits on the country’s broadly worded blasphemy laws, which can now be applied to such a wide range of acts that they can be used as tools of religious discrimination, Hussain said. The penalty for blasphemy is capital punishment.

“Usually anti-Christian feelings were expressed [by the plaintiffs] in blasphemy cases,” Hussain said.

Members of hard-line Islamic groups are strongly opposed to the military government’s support for the U.S. and British air campaign against Afghanistan, and a number of demonstrations have taken place around Pakistan against the government and the allies’ military actions. However, there does not appear to have been any other attack as deadly on Christians in recent years.

Channan said he believed that the attackers’ aim was to kill one of the Dominicans, a U.S. native who often celebrates Mass in the church.

“I suspect they came to kill the American Catholic priest. Thank goodness for him that today he had gone to a church seven or eight miles from here,” Channan said.

Channan rushed to the church from his hometown two hours away and arrived, he said, to find a scene of carnage.

Some of the bodies still lay inside in pools of blood, and the church walls had “hundreds” of bullet holes so that it “looked like someone had taken a drill to them,” he said.

Witnesses said that about 70 churchgoers were just finishing their Sunday morning service and the worshipers for the Catholic Mass, which begins at 9, were just starting to arrive at the church compound when six men roared up on three motorcycles and executed a policeman guarding the church.

Some witnesses said the men wore masks and also the long beards and flowing robes typical of some Muslim militias.

The attackers stormed into the building and began to fire at random into the crowd of worshipers, who cried out for mercy and tried to hide under the pews, according to witnesses.

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David Tajdin, a regular at the service, said: “I was just finishing singing the hymn when the firing started. I had no idea what was happening. They rushed in. They fired for maybe 10 minutes, even in the sacristy.”