The Telegraph
Sri Lankan cricketers attack in Lahore: Echoes of Mumbai raids Pakistani authorities have drawn parallels between the attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team in Lahore and the deadly Mumbai raids last year, saying the same group could be responsible for both acts of violence.
By Isambard Wilkinson in Lahore Last Updated: 7:11AM GMT 03 Mar 2009
"One thing I want to say it’s the same pattern, the same terrorists who attacked Mumbai,” said Punjab governor Salman Taseer.
India blamed that attack on Pakistan-trained militants and the incident sharply raised tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
The group considered responsible, Lashkar-e-Taiba, came from Pakistan’s Punjab province, whose capital is Lahore.
Analysts have already suggested the group that carried out the attack in Lahore was linked to the Mumbai attacks.
The region is unstable and Punjab has been the scene of bitter political tension in the last week after the Supreme Court banned Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister, and his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, the provincial governor, from holding office.
The federal government of President Asif Zardari then imposed its own rule in the province in the latest move in a power struggle between the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the opposition Mr Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League.
Critics have said that the political struggle has deflected attention away from Pakistan's campaign against terrorists.
A terrorist attack in Lahore, the capital of the country’s most politically important province, will once again focus attention on a deep-rooted terrorism problem about which many politicians are in deep denial.
A senior army officer recently questioned why Mr Sharif, who has a strong conservative religious element among his constituency, has not “condemned the Taliban”.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges