Salahuddin Haider, Special to Arab News

ISLAMABAD, 15 December 2003 — Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf yesterday escaped a second attempt on his life when a bomb partially damaged a road bridge minutes after his motorcade crossed it.

“The president is safe,” announced his spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan to the countrymen. Later Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad said in a TV interview that he had spoken to the president and found him “normal hale and hearty”.

Rashid described the explosion on the Jhanda Chichi Bridge in the garrison town of Rawalpindi as a bomb blast. No one was hurt.

Rashid said the president was returning to his home at Army House in Rawalpindi from the city’s airport after a visit to the southern city of Karachi.

He said an investigation had been launched.

Earlier, Gen. Sultan confirmed the explosion happened soon after the president’s vehicle passed. “His cavalcade had passed safely,” he said. “It is clearly a terrorist activity. Whether it was an assassination attempt or not, that can be established only after investigation.”

He declined to elaborate on who might have carried out such an attack on the president.

Asked where Musharraf was now, Sultan would only say, “He is very much at his place.”

GEO TV, a private network, reported the blast happened minutes after Musharraf passed the spot in Rawalpindi, the capital’s sister city.

Musharraf, the army chief, toppled an elected government in 1999 in a bloodless coup.

There has been at least one other attempt to assassinate the Pakistani leader. That failed when a car packed with explosives failed to detonate as Musharraf passed on a congested road in Karachi. Five militants were arrested for involvement in the attack.

Musharraf earned the wrath of hard-line Islamic groups after he chose to abandon the Taleban regime of neighboring Afghanistan and back the US-led war against Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda regime.

A witness told GEO he heard the explosion and saw smoke billowing out of the bridge after Musharraf’s motorcade passed by.

“My car was parked in the front row when the president’s car was passing. As the president’s car passed it appeared that somebody tried to blow up the bridge,” Irfan Mirza told the network. “After that there were clouds of black smoke there.”

Security agencies cordoned off the area after the bomb exploded and traffic was diverted to other roads, GEO reported.

Western diplomats, political commentators and businessmen agree that Pakistan would be left in a vulnerable position were Musharraf to be removed from power.

“The main worry I have about Pakistan is that there is no one who can take his place,” a leading businessman in Karachi said earlier this week.