Americans killed by explosions that tore church apart

Global terror

US diplomat's wife and child among five killed in attack on church

Americans killed by explosions that tore church apart

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The congregation of about 70 foreigners and Pakistanis were just turning to a sermon taken from St Luke when between one and three young men, dressed in black, burst into the Protestant International Church in Islamabad and hurled six grenades into their midst.

The Sunday morning calm was ripped apart as the church, popular with expatriates in the diplomatic enclave of the Pakistani capital, became filled with smoke and screaming. The explosions went off, one by one, blowing glass out of windows and maiming up to 45 of the worshippers. Some parents grappled their way downstairs in the dark to find their children at a Sunday School class.

The air cleared to reveal utter carnage. Some grenades had failed to detonate, and, for a while, people were afraid to move. Police arrived within minutes at the church, which witnesses said was littered with torn Bibles and bodies but the attackers had apparently walked away untouched.

Their morning raid had left five people dead – an American woman and her daughter, a Pakistani and an Afghan. An unidentified body may have been that of an assailant, police said, raising suspicions of a suicide attack.

The dead Americans were identified as a US embassy worker, Barbara Green, and her daughter Kristin Wormsley.

Nick Parham, a Briton with the Tearfund aid agency, said: "We were in the middle of our sermon when a bang went off at the back of the church. One chap came down the aisle a couple of feet away from me. He had a belt on with a whole load of what looked like British Army smoke grenades or home-made grenades. He had one in his hand. At that point, I hit the deck. There were five or six more explosions."

Elisabeth Mundhenk, a 54-year-old English teacher from Hamburg, dived under a piano until the smoke cleared. "There was blood, blood, blood, intestines lying on the floor," she said before being treated for shrapnel wounds in her leg.

Mark Robinson, 32, of San Clemente, California, said: "I saw one woman on the steps with a piece of shrapnel in her carotid artery. She bled to death right there."

Other foreign nationals injured included Americans, Germans, Swiss, Australians, Canadians, Sri Lankans, Ethiopians, Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans, as well as 12 Pakistanis. They are reported to include Sri Lanka's ambassador to Pakistan, his wife and their child.

No group claimed responsibility for the raid, which the Pakistani President, General Pervez Musharraf, condemned as a "ghastly act of terrorism". President George Bush was quick to back him up, denouncing the "acts of murder that cannot be tolerated by any person of conscience nor justified by any cause".

The US ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, visited the hospital and met the survivors. She said: "It's a tragedy." Asked what the motive of the attack could have been, she said: "Terrorism."

Later she described the Americans' victims as "members of the embassy family ... two friends I admired, respected and I loved".

"I honour them for their lives, for the joy they brought to so many, and for the credit and honour they brought to the United States."

Suspicion fell on hardline Islamist groups opposed to the Pakistani leader's support for the US-led war on terror. Seven groups have been banned and hundreds of activists have been detained recently in Pakistan.