In the third incident of its kind in the capital, motor-cycle borne gunmen targeted a senior Army officer, firing at his vehicle as he left his house early on Friday morning and quickly escaping from the scene.
The Brigadier and his driver were wounded in the attack that took place in the I-8 residential sector.
The police said they found a pistol and empty cartridges where the gunmen had fired at the Brigadier’s vehicle.
Television reports said the Brigadier worked with the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Along with a wave of terror strikes, the brazen ambushes on senior Army officers began last month, soon after the Pakistan Army began a ground offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan.
In the first of these attacks on October 22, Brigadier Moinudeen, who was posted with the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sudan, was killed along with a soldier when two gunmen on a motorcycle pumped bullets into their vehicle.
Five days later, a pair of motorcycle-borne gunmen tried to kill another Brigadier as he drove out of his house in the morning. His mother and driver were also in the vehicle. All the three escaped the attack. The gunmen were apparently waiting outside the house for 15 minutes.
All three attacks have taken place in outlying residential sectors of Islamabad, which are not as heavily guarded as the “red zone” which covers a number of government buildings and installations, the diplomatic enclave and some VIP residential sectors.
The attacks are presumed to have been carried out by the Taliban militants or their allies in one or the other of many jihadi groups that are spread across the country, and operate with impunity despite a ban on many of them.
The attacks are seen as retaliation for Operation Rah-e-Nijat (Path of Deliverance) in South Waziristan, where the military has surprisingly not met with much resistance as yet.
On Friday, the military said it had entered Makeen, which it described as “base headquarters” of the Taliban in South Waziristan, and also the home town of Beithullah Mehsud, who was killed by a U.S. missile in August.
A military statement said Beithullah Mehsud’s house had been razed to the ground, and “intense engagements” were taking place between soldiers and militants in the area, with “terrorists fleeing leaving behind their weapons and ammunition”. The military said it had killed 21 Taliban fighters in the Makeen area.
Earlier this week, troops were reported to marched into Laddha, another key Taliban base, and before that Sararogha, reclaiming a fort from where the security forces had been ousted by Taliban in 2007.
The statement said troops were consolidating their positions in all these places. The military claims to have killed more than 500 militants in the fighting thus far, and says it has lost 40 of its own men.
