Four people, including three nurses from a Christian missionary hospital, died in Pakistan on Friday in an apparent grenade attack, and up to 20 people were wounded, hospital and police officials said. "The nurses were coming out of the chapel when someone threw explosives," said Clement Bakhshi, an accounts officer at the hospital in Taxila, about 12 miles west of the capital, Islamabad.

"Three of our nurses have expired and up to 20 people have been injured, most of them nurses."

A police source in Taxila said one of the attackers had apparently blown himself up in a suicide attack.

"One was killed and two fled, and the explosives were tied to the body of the one who died," he told Reuters.

The incident came just four days after six Pakistanis were shot dead in a gun attack on a Christian missionary school for foreign students in the resort town of Murree.

Pakistani officials said the raid on the school appeared to be aimed at the foreign community rather than at a minority faith in Muslim-majority Pakistan.

In March, five people including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat died in a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad. Last October, 16 Christians and one Muslim were massacred in a church in Bahawalpur in populous Punjab province.

PHOTO CAPTION

Police question an unidentified man at the entrance to the American Consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2002. Security has been tightened following Monday's attack by unidentified gunmen on a Christian school that killed six people. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)
- Aug 07 12:21