Islamabad, Pakistan - More than 60 people were killed Thursday when two suicide bombers attacked Pakistan's largest weapons manufacturing complex just north of the capital, the deadliest attack by the Taliban in their escalating campaign against the government.

Police guard the site of Thursday's bombing in Wah, Pakistan. (Photo: Faisal Mahmood / Reuters)

    The attack came just days after the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf, leaving two rival political parties in the governing coalition haggling over the question of succession and adding a new layer of turbulence to an unstable, nuclear-armed nation. Neither party has been anxious to take on the campaign against the militants, which is seen here as an American conflict foisted on the country.

    The ordnance factories, in the town of Wah just off the main road that connects Islamabad to the northern city of Peshawar, make up Pakistan's biggest industrial complex, with 20,000 employees, according to retired Gen. Talat Masood, a former chairman of the factories. Run by the Ministry of Defense, the complex, Pakistan Ordnance Factories, consists of more than 16 factories that make ammunition of all kinds, as well as rifles, pistols, explosives and acid, mostly for export.

    In choosing the target, the Taliban singled out a symbolically important industry, and one that Pakistanis thought was virtually impregnable, General Masood said.

    The attack as well coordinated and timed during the mid-afternoon shift change to inflict maximum casualties, according to the inspector general of police in Punjab Province, Shaukat Javed.

    The two suicide bombers were on foot, and they blew themselves up in front of two gates at the factory at almost the same time, he said. Dozens of workers were injured, and the death toll seemed likely to climb higher than 60.

    The attack was one of the deadliest in Pakistan. The previous highest death toll was 55 people killed in Kurram in the tribal areas in February when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a campaign rally two days before the parliamentary elections, according to a tally by the daily newspaper Dawn.

    Just two days ago, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide attack that killed 35 people outside the emergency room of the government hospital in Dera Ismail Khan, a town on the edge of the tribal region.

    Several hours after the attack on Thursday the spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Maulvi Omar, issued a statement saying that the attack was in response to the military operation in Bajaur district in the country's northern tribal area, where the Pakistani Air Force has been striking at Taliban forces almost daily for the past two weeks.

    The campaign began after the Taliban outmaneuvered three convoys of the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary group under the command of the army, when they attempted to take back a security post in Bajaur.

    It is not clear how Pakistan's civilian government will respond. It has been showing mounting instability. The leader of the junior partner in the coalition, Nawaz Sharif, has threatened to leave the government in the coming days unless his demands are met to reinstate judges sacked by Mr. Musharraf.

    There were 56 suicide attacks in Pakistan last year, many of them by the Taliban.

    Military installations were among the targets last year, and several of the attacks were in crowded urban areas. But no single death toll reached more than 50 last year, General Masood said.

    After the record number of suicide attacks in 2007, there had been a tapering off by the Taliban, in large part because of peace talks between the Taliban and the government earlier this year.

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