At least 20 people were killed Monday after gunmen stormed a Pakistan police training school near the eastern city of Lahore, police officials told AFP."The number of killed is at least 20," police sub inspector Amjad Ahmad told AFP outside the police training ground in Manawan.
Other police officials said the number of casualties may be higher given the heavy crossfire between the attackers holed up at the training centre and paramilitary troops who fanned around the perimeter of the ground.
"The number of casualties may be more," said police official Rias ad Bajwa.
Television footage showed bodies of policemen lying face down on the parade ground as heavy gunfire rattled out of the training ground at Manawan outside Pakistan's cultural capital Lahore.
Paramilitary soldiers, armed and wearing flak jackets and helmets, opened fire and fanned out around the perimeter of the site, which was surrounded by scores of police cars and armoured vehicles, an AFP reporter said.
Police officials declined to say how many people had been killed or wounded but state television reported at least four dead.
"Unknown gunmen have attacked the police training school, we have called in elite forces," senior police official Mumtaz Sukhera told reporters.
"We do not know about casualties," Sukhera said.
A second senior police official, Inam Wahid, said that assailants wearing police uniform had occupied the training school.
"According to initial reports up to 20 policemen are injured," he told AFP.
Officials in Islamabad said the interior ministry chief was locked in an emergency meeting with senior police and security officials.
The attack came weeks after another attackers armed with guns and grenades mounted a coordinated assault on Sri Lanka's touring cricket team on March 3, killing eight people and wounding seven members of the squad.
Those attackers walked away unhindered by police and authorities have not announced any high-profile arrest in connection with the assault, which has at least temporarily ended Pakistani chances of hosting international sport.
Officials said that assault bore the hallmarks of the November 2008 attack on the Indian financial capital of Mumbai, which was blamed on Pakistan-based Islamic militants and killed 165 people.
Lahore is Pakistan's second largest city and capital of wheat-bowl Punjab province which also country's political nerve centre.
Extremists opposed to the Pakistan government's decision to side with the United States in its "war on terror" have carried out a series of bombings and other attacks that have killed nearly 1,700 people in less than two years.
Much of the unrest has been concentrated in northwest Pakistan, where the army has been bogged down fighting Taliban militants and Al-Qaeda extremists.
On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a packaged mosque in a town in the northwestern tribal town of Jamrud, killing around 50 people.
US officials say northwest Pakistan has degenerated into a safe haven for Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants who fled the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and have regrouped to launch attacks on foreign troops across the border.
Such is the scale of extremist violence that US President Barack Obama has placed Pakistan at the heart of the fight against Al-Qaeda, tripling US aid to the nuclear-armed nation as part of a new strategy that also commits billions of dollars and thousands more troops to the Afghan war.
Obama said that Al-Qaeda and its allies were "a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within" and warned Islamabad to "demonstrate its commitment" to eliminating extremists on its soil.
Last month Zardari's government suspended Punjab's provincial assembly and administration, imposing central rule after a court ruling disqualifying its chief minister Shahbaz Sharif -- brother of Pakistan's opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.
The governor who assumed administrative powers shuffled the bureaucracy and police in order to establish his hold, but critics say the hurried transfers undermined the security apparatus.
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