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By JANE PERLEZ
Published: October 23, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bombing at Pakistan’s premier aeronautical manufacturing complex killed seven people on Friday morning, the ninth attack on major government installations this month.
Security personnel at a checkpoint after a suicide attack at an air force complex in Pakistan on Friday.

The bomber blew up himself at the checkpoint at the entrance to the complex, 40 miles northwest of Islamabad, as workers arrived for the morning shift, said a district police official, Fakhur Sultan.

Two men guarding the checkpoint and five civilians were killed, Mr. Sultan said. The Pakistan Aeronautical Complex at Kamra is the country’s main air force maintenance and research hub, where engineers and workers build and overhaul fighter jets and radar systems.

The relentless pace of assaults against sensitive and prominent targets in Pakistan comes as the army is conducting a major offensive against Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in the remote tribal area of South Waziristan. The attacks are seen as reprisals by the militants for the campaign against them in their tribal heartland.

On Thursday morning, a senior army officer, Brig. Moinuddin Haider, was assassinated by two gunmen who attacked his jeep during rush-hour traffic in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

The Taliban had warned before the start of the campaign in South Waziristan that they planned to unleash attacks against Pakistan’s military assets.

The Taliban attacked the headquarters of the Pakistani Army, in Rawalpindi, in a commando-style raid on Oct. 10. The insurgents took more than 40 civilians and soldiers hostage for 20 hours, and more than 20 people were killed in the siege.

With the military nearing the end of its first week of fighting in South Waziristan, some military reports said Friday that soldiers had captured the strategic town of Tor Ghundai on the southeast axis of the army’s assault path.

Elsewhere, at least 16 people were killed when a minibus hit an anti-tank mine on Friday in the tribal area of Mohmand, bordering Afghanistan, district officials said.

“It was an anti-tank mine and consider the damage it would have caused to a mini-bus,” said a senior official in Mohmand tribal region said, requesting that he not be named. “There have been few survivors.” Among the dead were four women and two children. Six others were wounded, he added.

He said that the area was under control of militants, and that troops from the government’s paramilitary Frontier Corps had launched an operation to flush them out of the area. “It seems that the militants had planted the mine to stop the advancing forces,” he said.

Six people wounded in the minibus explosion were brought to Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, where there was another attack Friday. Militants exploded a car bomb in the parking lot of a banquet facility in Peshawar, wounding 10 people, district officials said.