The target of two car bombs that exploded on Wednesday in Karachi, killing at least one person and wounding 17, was a privately run English-language school and not the nearby residence of the United States consul general in the southern Pakistani port city, a US State Department official said.
The official, citing information from received in Washington from US and Pakistani authorities in Karachi and Islamabad, said the car bombs were aimed at the Pakistan-American Cultural Centre (PACC) , which is not affiliated with the US government.
“We have no connection with this facility,” the official said on condition of anonymity. “There are no Americans on its staff and there were no Americans injured.”
The official said the PACC caters mainly to middle-class high school and college students seeking to improve their English language skills and that it appeared the bombers may have targeted the institution in the mistaken belief that it was connected with Washington.
The home of the US consul general in Karachi is about 150m from the centre but was not damaged in in the blasts that Pakistani police and medical sources said killed a police guard and wounded 17 other people.
Karachi police chief Tariq Jamil said the explosions occurred in two cars parked near the consul’s residence and the adjacent PACC and called the blasts “an act of terrorism” that targeted “the US building”.
The explosions came less than 24 hours after a bomb exploded at the Karachi port on Tuesday, killing two people and injuring two others, and followed a warning from the US embassy in Islamabad earlier this month that said the threat of terrorism in Pakistan is “high”,
The May 13 embassy warning attributed the threat to tensions along the Afghan border and instability in the Middle East and Iraq and urged US citizens in Pakistan to boost their security.
It also said that already high anti-American sentiment in Pakistan could rise and said Western embassies and consulates throughout the country, as well as places where foreigners gather, might be “high priority” targets for terrorists.
The alert was the second released by the US since Pakistan stepped up operations against foreign militants, many of them suspected members of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, and remnants of the Taliban militia in the tribal province of Waziristan in March.
On April 7, the US consulate in Karachi, which was hit by a suicide car bomb attack in June 2002 that killed 12 Pakistani bystanders and guards and was the target of a foiled strike two months ago, warned of the “real possibility” of fresh terrorist attacks in the city.
It said a series of attacks and attempted attacks in and around the southern city in March and early April indicated that extremists may be plotting additional strikes, particularly against so-called “soft targets”. — Sapa-AFP
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