KARACHI, 11 June 2004 — The top army commander in Karachi escaped an assassination attempt yesterday when a group of unidentified people attacked his convoy. At least 11 people were killed when the assailants opened fire on Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat’s motorcade and threw a grenade at his escort, police said.

Minutes later a bomb went off, damaging a nearby wall, said Idrees Malik, a military spokesman.

Hayat’s driver was among those killed after gunfire hit at least two cars in the convoy.

“He (Hayat) was the target and he escaped the assassination attempt,” army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said in Islamabad.

Police said at least three or four gunmen, who appeared to be highly trained, escaped in a rented van abandoned about 10 km from the site of the attack. They said they found a Kalashnikov rifle, empty shells and a mask inside.

A police source said employees of the rental firm were helping police put together the sketches of four men who hired the van.

“It was a well-planned ambush,” a senior military officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Emergency workers said the dead were six soldiers, three policemen and two civilians. Eight people were wounded. Sultan said most of those killed or hurt were the general’s escort detail.

The attack was staged near the city’s Clifton Bridge, about 500 meters from the US Consulate.

Mohammed Hussain, a police officer, said he had spotted a bag on the road after the gunbattle and threw it into a vacant field nearby, where it exploded, hurting no one but collapsing a 3-meter-high wall.

Security officials later saw another suspicious bag by the bridge and found a bomb inside. It was defused. It contained five kilograms of explosives attached to a mobile phone rigged to detonate it, police said.

Gen. Hayat is the top military official in Pakistan’s largest city of 14 million people, which over the past month has been rocked by terrorist attacks and sectarian unrest that has killed dozens of people.

An intelligence officer said that when Hayat changed cars after the attack, his shirt collar and pants were bloodstained.

However, Sultan said Hayat was “perfectly all right” and had attended a meeting at his office afterward.

Karachi has been the scene of numerous bombings and shootings blamed on militants since President Gen. Pervez Musharraf threw his support behind the US-led war against Al-Qaeda and the Taleban in neighboring Afghanistan in late 2001.

The attempt on Hayat’s life follows two failed assassination attempts in December against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi. Musharraf blamed Al-Qaeda for those attacks, and a number of renegade military personnel have also been implicated.

Army spokesman Sultan refused to speculate on who could be behind yesterday’s attack, or whether the assailants had links to Al-Qaeda suspects who on Wednesday clashed with soldiers in a lawless tribal region near the Afghan border, leaving at least 20 people dead.

“It is too early to say who could be behind the attack in Karachi,” he said. “But, definitely it is a terrorist attack, and those people who want to destabilize the country are behind it.”

Security agencies put airports in three cities on alert after the attack, following a “hijacking threat.”

“On intelligence reports, we put Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore airports under high alert in which we take all anti-hijacking measures,” said Maj. Riaz Ahmed, a spokesman for the force responsible for security at airports in Pakistan.

He declined to say who had issued the threat or against which airlines. A similar clampdown took place in May after authorities received word a small band of Al-Qaeda militants might be plotting to hijack or explode a plane bound for the United Arab Emirates.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Hayat, which came a day after the election of a new top official for Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital. His predecessor resigned amid the city’s deteriorating security situation.

The well-orchestrated attack in Karachi follows at least three unsolved bombings here in the past month that triggered deadly riots by Sunnis and Shiites, throwing the city into turmoil. “People are losing their sense of security because even the president to corps commander are under attack, mosques and imambargahs are being bombed and no one is safe,” said Abdul Razzak, 45, a betel nut vendor.

— Additional input from agencies