New attack on Pakistan navy kills five

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers stand guard in Karachi KARACHI,  Pakistan - AFP Four Pakistani navy personnel were killed Thursday when attackers bombed a bus taking them to work, the third such assault in days in the country's biggest city of Karachi.

More than a dozen people were wounded in the attack in Faisal Avenue, one of the main roads in Pakistan's politically tense economic capital and port city, which NATO uses to ship supplies to troops in Afghanistan.
A passing motorcyclist was also killed in the blast.

Two other navy buses were attacked on Tuesday, dealing a blow to the military just days after Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Kayani claimed his forces had "broken the back" of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants. "Now a total of four of our employees -- all sailors -- have been martyred in the attack on our bus while seven others are injured," spokesman Commander Salman Ali told AFP. Four other navy personnel died on Tuesday.

The bomb exploded close to the scene of Pakistan's deadliest attack, which killed 139 people at the 2007 homecoming of the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was subsequently killed in a separate bombing two months later. "I was trying to cross the road a few feet away from the bus when I heard an explosion and saw the bus was hit and people inside and around crying," said Asghar Ali, a passer-by being treated for injuries in hospital. "I joined people trying to rescue the victims. There was blood inside and outside," he told AFP. Police official Iftikhar Tarar said the blast appeared to be the work of the same group behind Tuesday's bombings, which wounded nearly 60 people and were the worst attacks on military officials in Karachi in years. Authorities blamed extremist Islamist organisations linked to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for the recent bus bombings

Home to Pakistan's stock exchange and a lifeline for a depressed economy wilting under inflation and stagnating foreign investment, Karachi had beensheltered from the worst of the violence blamed on Islamist militants.
But rivalries between the Urdu-speaking majority and an influx of Pashtuns from the northwest have fuelled outbreaks of political violence that killed more than 150 people last year in the city of 16 million.

Across the country, bomb attacks have killed more than 4,240 people since July 2007, and the United States considers Pakistan's northwestern border areas with Afghanistan the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
Pakistan is a key ally of the United States against the Taliban but there is a deep mistrust between the two countries spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry, however, denied receiving any reports of border shooting.
Pakistan is a key ally of the United States against the Taliban but deep mistrust between the two countries' intelligence agencies was laid bare this week with the leak of a 2007 US list of "terrorist and terrorist support entities" that included Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

The exposure of the private US assessment may cause new strains in the relationship between the United States and ISI, which has longstanding ties to militants but has also worked closely with the CIA.
Pakistan helped create the Taliban, who imposed an austere brand of Islam on Afghanistan until the 2001 US-led invasion removed them from power. Islamabad has received billions of dollars in US aid in the past decade and bristles at suggestions it is playing a double game.