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Militants have launched a string of attacks on police in Lahore in the Pakistani heartland and in the troubled northwest, killing 29 people after a week of violence in which more than 100 people died.

The attacks on police in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and a car bomb in Kohat in the northwest, come ahead of an expected military offensive against the Taliban in their South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border. The cause was not immediately known.Later, a blast went off in a neighbourhood where government workers live in the northwestern city of Peshawar killing a child and wounding nine people, a rescue worker and media said.”First the (North West) Frontier province was on the front line, now they are playing their games in Punjab,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Geo television.The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by militants to Punjab, Pakistan’s most economically important province and the country’s traditional seat of power.Nuclear-armed Pakistan is under US pressure to crack down on Islamic militancy as President Barack Obama considers a boost in troop numbers fighting in neighboring Afghanistan.The government says most attacks in the country are plotted in South Waziristan and carried out by Taliban, often with the help of allies from militant groups based in Punjab province.Seven people, including one gunman, were killed at a regional headquarters of the police’s Federal Investigation Agency.Ten gunmen, some of them teenagers, were killed in the attacks on three police centers in Lahore.A suicide car-bomber attacked the same building in March last year killing 21 people. One gunman escaped and one was captured, security officials said.Eleven police, six of them recruits, and four gunmen were killed at the Manawa training center, police said.Gunmen also attacked two police training centers, one a training school attacked this year and the other an elite police academy set in fields in the city outskirts.A policeman, a civilian and five gunmen were killed at the academy and media had reported hostages taken. Three of the black-clad attackers blew themselves up.Several hours after the attacks began, police said all three centers had been cleared and no hostages had been taken. Three gunmen blew themselves up and two, including one who was about 16, were shot by snipers, police said.Pakistan’s stock market slipped as the violence escalated at the start of the week, but the main index has since recouped the losses and rose 0.The attacks in Lahore spread fear and sirens from police and other emergency vehicles wailed over the city as hundreds of police and soldiers sealed off the three sites.”The market is sort of used to terror attacks,” said Mohammed Sohail, chief executive at brokers Topline Securities.4 percent on Thursday despite the latest bloodshed.” DRONE KILLS FOUR Shortly before the attacks in Lahore, a suicide car bomber set off his explosives outside a police station in Kohat killing 10 people, police and military officials said.”These high-profile targets are a concern, but investors are optimistic that eventually the Waziristan operation will take place and the terrorists will be attacked.There was no immediate claim for Thursday’s violence.There was no immediate claim for Thursday’s violence.The Taliban said it carried out the brazen assault on the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi and some other attacks and vowed more in revenge for the killing of their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a US missile strike in August.The government in June ordered the army to launch an offensive in South Waziristan. Since then the military has been conducting air and artillery strikes to soften up militant defenses.Aircraft flew several bombing sorties to attack the Makeen militant base in South Waziristan on Thursday, security officials said. .The government says the assault is imminent but it will be up to the army to decide when to send in ground troops.”Such barbaric, inhuman and un-Islamic terrorist acts only strengthen our resolve to fight terrorism with more vitality,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in a statement.Separately, a US drone aircraft fired two missiles at a house in the North Waziristan region, killing four Afghan Taliban militants linked to a faction led by veteran militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, Pakistani officials said.The United States, struggling with an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan and frustrated with Pakistan’s failure to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries on its side of the border, stepped up attacks by its drones in September last year.Hundreds of people, most of them militants but including some civilians, have been killed.