World Vision attacked in Pakistan; 6 dead

ISLAMABAD — Suspected militants armed with assault rifles and a homemade bomb attacked the offices of the World Vision Christian aid group helping earthquake survivors in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing six Pakistani employees, police and the organization said.

The assault prompted Federal Way-based World Vision, a major international humanitarian group, to suspend its operations in Pakistan. Other aid organizations condemned the attack but said it would not lead them to curtail their own activities.

Dean Owen, spokesman for World Vision, said in addition to the six aid workers killed, another woman is in a coma in a hospital. It was her first day on the job.

He said about 10-20 armed assailants entered the World Vision operation carrying guns, bombs and grenades. They gathered the staff together, robbed them of jewelry, wallets, money, cellphones and computers, then shot some of them and escaped.

All six workers killed, four men and two women, were Muslims from Pakistan, Owen said.

World Vision does not know what provoked the attack, he said.

"We will review our security procedures to see if they were at an appropriate level," Owen said. "We did have some security staff, but obviously they were overwhelmed by 10-20 individuals."

He said World Vision was temporarily ceasing its operation in Pakistan pending a review, but he expects it will resume. "This won't cause us to leave," he said.

Extremists have killed employees of other foreign aid groups in Pakistan and have accused such organizations of working against Islam, greatly hampering efforts to raise living standards in the desperately poor region. Many groups have already scaled down operations in northwest Pakistan or have pulled out altogether.

Islamists often target Christian groups, which they accuse of trying to convert Muslims.

The attack took place in Ogi, a small town in Mansehra district, which was badly hit by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

A local police official, Liaquat Shah, said the attackers first opened fire inside the office and then left a homemade bomb they detonated by remote control.

"They left a locally made pressure-cooker bomb that exploded soon after the attackers fled, killing NGO people first by gunfire and then with the blast," Shah said.

The attack seriously damaged the aid group's office, leaving the ground strewn with rubble and the concrete walls pockmarked with bullet holes, AP Television News footage showed. A tattered red office chair lay overturned among the debris.

Al-Qaida, the Taliban and allied groups are strong in northwestern Pakistan, but Mansehra lies outside the tribal belt next to Afghanistan where the militants have their main bases, and is relatively peaceful.

Islamist militants see foreign aid groups and local outfits that receive international funds as a challenge to their authority in regions under their influence. The organizations often employ women and support female rights initiatives, further angering the extremists.

Many foreign aid groups set up offices in Mansehra after the 2005 earthquake, which killed about 80,000 people and left 3 million people homeless.

Owen said World Vision loses on average one staff member every year to violence, but never have they lost as many as six at one time. But he pointed out that other aid workers have also been targeted. In all, World Vision has up to 45,000 staff around world in 100 countries. With a budget of $2.6 billion, it's one of the world's largest relief organizations.

"This was totally senseless. These are Muslim staff helping other Muslims, their own neighbors," Owen said. "It's a tragic situation. There's a brutal injustice to this attack we just can't explain."

In 2008, militants there killed four Pakistanis working for Plan International, a British-based charity that mainly helps children. The attack forced several foreign agencies to scale back assistance to the area.

In 2003, two workers from Mercy Corps, the charity based in the Pacific Northwest, were killed and a third seriously wounded as their vehicle came under attack Sunday in northern Eritrea.

But aid groups said that Wednesday's attack would not cause them to suspend their operations.

"I would not feel that it means anything but intensifying our own way of doing things," said Pepe Salmela, the country director for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which works on community-based health and disaster preparedness programs in Mansehra.

"We have quite a big security team and a security coordinator in Islamabad who went to Mansehra today to study the situation," said Salmela.

U.N. spokeswoman Ishrat Rizvi also said the attack would not curtail the world body's activities in Pakistan.

"Any single attack on any implementing partner would not result in the closure of U.N. operations in those areas, but we definitely condemn any such attack," said Rizvi.

Owen said there was no indication at World Vision in Pakistan that workers were being targeted, but said the organization is very visible. "We have cellphones, computers, vehicles with logos," he said. "We can be real targets to bandits. While we recognize aid workers are often targets, the public typically doesn't grasp that until we have an incident like this. It's shocking, totally unexpected, unprovoked and a brutal attack."

The Pakistani government has fought back against militants staging attacks in the country by launching several military operations over the last year and a half to deprive the insurgents of their sanctuaries in the northwest.

The U.S. has also pummeled militants in Pakistan's tribal area with dozens of deadly missile strikes, including one Wednesday that killed at least four people in North Waziristan, said officials.

Drones fired four missiles at a house and a nearby truck in the Mazer Meda Khel area, some 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of the main town of Miran Shah, said local government official Sabir Khan.

The identities of those killed in the attack were not known.

The U.S. refuses to discuss publicly the drone program in Pakistan, but officials say privately it has killed several senior al-Qaida and Taliban commanders.

Seattle Times staff reporter Susan Gilmore and Associated Press writers Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad and Hussain Afzal in Parachinar contributed to this report.