Pakistan attack targets nuclear lab workers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide attack last week on a bus in Rawalpindi was the first singling out of workers at Pakistan's prized nuclear labs, military analysts and prominent national newspapers said, raising new questions about the government's ability to withstand increasingly bold assaults from the Taliban against the country's military complex.

The attack comes as Pakistan's army is fighting the Taliban on several fronts and is about to begin an even more ambitious campaign in the insurgents' heartland in Waziristan.

Government officials have said that Thursday's attack hit a bus carrying workers from a non-nuclear military factory, but military analysts said they believe that this was an effort by the government to downplay the embarrassment of having a vehicle connected with the nuclear program hit.

The Taliban and al-Qaida have announced that their goal is to topple Pakistan's government and gain control of its nuclear arsenal. Military and other analysts said that singling out nuclear workers, even though they were traveling outside the weapons lab, carries heavy symbolism in a nation that believes its ultimate strength lies in its nuclear capability. It also showed a worrisome level of sophistication.

"It showed that their intelligence is current," said Talat Masood, a retired general and a political and military analyst. "It was a deliberate strike. They are trying to give a hint that they can strike the personnel who are working for the nuclear facilities."

The attack killed the suicide bomber, who rammed the bus with his motorcycle, and wounded 30 workers, the police said. Military analysts said the workers were from the Kahuta Research Laboratories, where weapons-grade uranium is produced. No high-level scientist was on board.

The United States has spent almost $100 million in training Pakistani security personnel in how to make the country's nuclear warheads safe, and how to store them separately from the missiles and trigger devices. But in the past year, Washington officials have expressed growing alarm about the nation's nuclear laboratories, like Kahuta.

The Kahuta lab was once run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program and one of the most successful nuclear proliferators in history.

Immediately after the attack, police said the bus, which was idling at a busy intersection when it was hit, was carrying workers from the nuclear lab. But since then, government officials have said that the bus belonged to the country's Heavy Mechanical Complex, a military engineering lab at Taxila.

An official at the complex, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, denied that, and, in another indication that the bus carried nuclear workers, several of them are being treated at a hospital run by the nuclear labs, according to officials at the scene.