Nine rockets fired at Pakistan Military Academy

Unidentified attackers on Friday fired rockets at the country’s top military training facility, the Pakistan Military Academy, damaging its outer wall in a major security breach near the place where Osama bin Laden lived for years, officials said. No one was hurt in the pre-dawn attack and it was unclear who fired the nine rockets from behind a mosque in mountains overlooking the Kakul academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, 50 kilometres from the capital. Abbottabad was considered one of the safest parts of nuclear-armed Pakistan until American Special Forces on May 2 found and killed the al Qaeda founder in a compound where he apparently lived for five years. The bin Laden raid humiliated Pakistan’s powerful military, exposing it to charges of complicity or incompetence after it emerged that the world’s most wanted man had lived on the doorstep of its premier academy for years. Three rockets on Friday damaged the outer wall of the academy, which is just 500 metres from the site of the US Navy SEALs raid that seriously damaged already turbulent relations between Pakistan and the United States. “Nine rockets were fired. Three rockets hit the boundary wall of the military academy and damaged it. No one was hurt in the attack,” Imtiaz Hussain Shah, a top local government official in Abbottabad told AFP. “We have launched a search operation,” Shah added. Mohammad Karim Khan, Abbottabad police chief, confirmed the attack. “Three rockets hit the boundary wall. Three others landed in an open area and three others landed in a field,” he said. Officials blamed terrorists for the attack, which came one day after Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, visited Abbottabad. Shah later confirmed to AFP no arrests had yet been made and that a rooftop room had also been damaged in the attack. “We have a security system and checkpoints on the roads, but the place they used as a launch pad is accessible from all sides and there are mountains at the back of this place,” he told a private TV channel. “At this stage we cannot say who was involved, but they are terrorists and we are investigating how they managed to reach this place.” Taliban and other Islamist militants are fighting an insurgency against the army, although there has been a marked decline in violence in recent months.