Attackers Kill 3 at Pakistan Christian Church

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —  Three assailants hurled grenades today at people leaving a church inside a Christian hospital near Islamabad, killing three nurses in the second attack against Christian or Western interests in Pakistan in less than a week.

One of the attackers also died in the assault at the hospital in Taxila, about 25 miles west of Islamabad, the capital, said Taxila police inspector Fatha Khan.

Khan did not identify the attackers.

Hospital officials said three nurses, all Pakistani, died in the attack and that 15 others were injured. They did not describe the nature or seriousness of the injuries.

Clement Bakhshi, an accounts officer at the hospital, said, “Three of our nurses have expired.”

Details about the attack were not entirely, clear, however.

A police source in Taxila said of the attackers, “One was killed and two fled, and the explosives were tied to the body of the one who died.”

It was the latest in a series of assaults targeting Christian institutions or foreigners in Pakistan since the military government of President Pervez Musharraf incensed militant Muslim groups by siding with the U.S.-led war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The incident came just four days after six Pakistanis were shot dead in an attack on the Murree Christian School for foreign students in the town of Jhika Gali.

Three men suspected in that attack blew themselves up Tuesday after they were challenged at a checkpoint, a police official said.

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.

The school has been closed until at least Monday.

In March, five people, including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat, died in a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad.