ISLAMABAD - Four people, including three nurses from a Christian missionary hospital, died in Pakistan today in an apparent grenade attack, and up to 20 people were wounded, hospital and police officials said. It was the latest assault on Western interests in less than a week.
''The nurses were coming out of the chapel when someone threw explosives,'' said Clement Bakhshi, an accounts officer at the hospital in Taxila, about 12 miles west of the capital, Islamabad.
''Three of our nurses have expired and up to 20 people have been injured, most of them nurses.''
A police source in Taxila said one of the attackers had apparently blown himself up in a suicide attack.
''One was killed and two fled, and the explosives were tied to the body of the one who died,'' he told Reuters.
The incident came just four days after six Pakistanis were shot dead in a gun attack on a Christian missionary school for foreign students in the resort town of Murree.
On Monday, gunmen burst through the gates of the Murree Christian School about 30 miles northeast of Islamabad, killing six people, all Pakistanis.
Police said later in the week that three men responsible for the attack blew themselves up with grenades after escaping from a police checkpoint.
Pakistani officials said the raid on the school appeared to be aimed at the foreign community rather than at a minority faith in Muslim-majority Pakistan.
In March, five people including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat died in a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad.
Last October, 16 Christians and one Muslim were massacred in a church in Bahawalpur in populous Punjab province.
Pakistani police said on Wednesday they had evidence that three men who blew themselves up on Tuesday in Kashmir were the same gang that killed six people in an attack on a Christian school this week.
The trio were challenged by police when they tried to enter the village of Khabadar in Pakistani Kashmir about 12 miles from the scene of Monday's attack, police said on Tuesday.
Police freed the suspects after they threatened to explode a grenade. Then the three men walked to a nearby river where they blew themselves up.
''We have overwhelming evidence that they are involved in the [church school] attack,'' Deputy Inspector General of Police Israr Ahmad told Reuters from Murree, the hill town northeast of Islamabad that was the scene of the school shootings.