Militants armed with guns and grenades stormed the offices of a US-based Christian charity in Pakistan on Wednesday, killing five aid workers in an attack blamed on Islamist insurgents.
The gunmen besieged the World Vision building near Oghi town in Mansehra district of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants have been waging a deadly campaign of attacks.
Police and World Vision's regional spokesman said five Pakistani staff, including two women, were killed and seven other employees wounded when up to 15 gunmen arrived in pick-up vehicles and began firing on the aid workers.
"They gathered all of us in one room. The gunmen, some of whom had their faces covered, also snatched our mobile phones," said World Vision administration officer Mohammad Sajidm, who was in the office at the time.
"They dragged people one by one and shifted to an adjacent room and shot and killed them," he said.
Rienk van Velzen, World Vision's regional communications director, told AFP by telephone from the Netherlands that all staff in the office were Pakistani.
"The sad news is that five local colleagues were killed -- three male and two female. We have seven colleagues injured... one is missing," he said.
The organisation has been operating in the area since October 2005, when aid workers flooded into the northwest after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5 million homeless.
But many charities have since left the area, as Islamist violence soars. In February 2008, four aid workers with the British-based group Plan International were killed in a similar gun and grenade attack in Mansehra town.
Police said the militants on Wednesday opened fire and detonated hand grenades near Oghi, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of Islamabad, killing five people before escaping into the hills.
"Police rushed to the area after receiving information about the attack, but the attackers managed to flee," senior police officer Waqar Ahmed told AFP.
"We chased them, there was an exchange of fire, but the gunmen escaped into the mountains," he added.
Ahmed blamed the attack on "the same people who are destroying our schools" -- a reference to Taliban militants opposed to co-education who have blown up hundreds of schools across the northwest in the past three years.
"Now they want to disturb relief work in quake-hit areas," Ahmed said.
World Vision's website describes the group as "a Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation" founded by a US reverend.
It says the aid group is "inspired by our Christian values", but stresses that the organisation does not proselytise or hinge aid on a person's faith.
Foreign targets are rarely attacked directly in Pakistan, despite the chronic insecurity in the nuclear-armed Muslim state, which is a key ally in the US-led war on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.
A wave of suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan has killed more than 3,000 people since 2007. Blame has fallen on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants bitterly opposed to the alliance with the United States.
The United Nations decided last year to relocate a limited number of its international staff from Pakistan because of security concerns.
The UN's World Food Programme office in Islamabad was attacked in October last year, with five aid workers killed in a suicide bombing.
Then on February 3, a bomb attack in the NWFP district of Lower Dir killed three American soldiers and five other people at the opening of a school just rebuilt with Western funding after an Islamist attack.
Elsewhere in the northwest on Wednesday, police found the bodies of two men the Taliban had accused of spying for the United States.
The local tribesmen had been snatched last month from Mir Ali in North Waziristan tribal region, and their "bullet-riddled bodies were found dumped under a bridge," police officer Dildar Khan said.
