A suicide blast killed the Pakistani military's top medical officer and seven others yesterday, as key US "war on terror" ally President Pervez Musharraf rejected fresh pressure to step down.
The attack in the garrison city of Rawalpindi was one of three separate incidents Monday that marked a resurgence in violence after a lull during elections last week which saw Musharraf's allies ousted from power.
Army officials said that Lieutenant General Mushtaq Baig, the army's surgeon general, was the highest ranking Pakistani officer to be killed in an attack since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
"This was the first suicide attack in Pakistan in which a high-ranking military official has been killed since 9/11 and also the first attack after the election," chief military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said.
The army said the general, his driver and guard were "martyred" along with five civilians, while 25 people were wounded.
Another bomb attack in Quetta killed three more Pakistani soldiers yesterday. Four others were also wounded when a bomb blew up an army vehicle in a southwestern province troubled by a tribal insurgency, officials said.
The remote-controlled roadside bomb attack happened in Lehri, a town in the insurgency-hit Dera Bugti district of Baluchistan province bordering Afghanistan, they said.
Taliban militants said Sunday they were ready for peace talks with Pakistan's new government, but only if it rejects Musharraf's military campaign against them in the country's tribal belt.
Musharraf's spokesman Monday dismissed fresh pressure at home and abroad for the embattled leader to step down after his allies were trounced in parliamentary elections.
A US senator who monitored the polls one week ago said Musharraf should be given a "graceful way to move", while arch-foe and former premier Nawaz Sharif said the sooner the president stepped down, the better.
"Except for Nawaz Sharif it is clear that no one else is talking about the president leaving," Musharraf's spokesman, Major General Rashid Qureshi, told Dawn News Television.
Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N formed a coalition with the Pakistan People's Party of slain ex-premier Benazir Bhutto last week, after their groupings ousted Musharraf's backers from government in the elections.
They are seeking further allies to get them the two-thirds majority in parliament with which they could theoretically impeach the president.
"Musharraf should quit as soon as possible. It would be better for him because the people have given their mandate," Sharif said after meeting a hardline Islamist party leader.
Musharraf ousted Sharif in a coup in 1999 and sent him into exile the following year. Sharif returned to Pakistan in late 2007.
In Washington, Joe Biden, one of three US senators who observed the elections, discussed Musharraf's options in a television interview.
Asked on ABC television if he thought it would be good for Musharraf to prepare an exit strategy to resign or retire to avoid being forced out by a hostile parliament, Biden said: "Probably".
Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper cited an anonymous aide as saying that Musharraf was readying such a strategy after Bhutto and Sharif's parties won the elections.
"I firmly believe if they (political parties) do not focus on old grudges -- and there's plenty in Pakistan -- and give him a graceful way to move," then Musharraf would leave office, Biden added.
Musharraf's spokesman rejected Biden's comments and said the president was ready to work with the new government.
"The president has been elected for a period of five years by the assemblies of Pakistan, which have been elected by the Pakistani people and not by senators from the US," he added.
"So I don't think he needs to respond to anything that is said by these people in their capacity."
The opposition's stance on Musharraf is still unclear, with Sharif calling almost daily for him to step down but the PPP avoiding outright calls for him to resign or saying directly whether it will press for his impeachment.
Sharif said Monday that if Musharraf stayed on, then judges sacked by him under emergency rule in November should be restored so they can decide the legality of Musharraf's re-election as president in October last year.