Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf has pledged to attack those responsible for intensifying the violence in the country since last week.

Speaking to newspaper editors in Islamabad, Musharraf said there was a direct fight going on between moderate factions and extremist forces in Pakistan and said the solution lay in the "democratic process".

The urgent meeting with the media was called after terrorist attacks on an anti-government rally killed seventeen on Tuesday night.

Intelligence involvement

Police officials in the capital said it was a suicide attack but Munir Malik, the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association and counsel to the Chief justice of Pakistan, rejected the claim and blamed the intelligence agencies.

"It was a planted device," he said. "It was timed to be set off at 8:30 p.m. -- the time we had given to the Islamabad Bar Association for the arrival of the Chief Justice to address their convention."

He explained that the victims of the blast had all "suffered injuries on the lower torso of their bodies." He said there had to be a hole in the ground as "this doesn’t happen in suicide attacks -- this happens in planted bombs."

Munir Malik is supported by hundreds of lawyers who say the attack was directly targeted at the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, sacked in March by the president who accused him of impropriety. The matter sparked widespread protests and triggered a war between the judiciary and the military.

Attack on PPP?

However, the local media reported that the attack was aimed at the Pakistan People's Party, or PPP, whose chairwoman Benazir Bhutto officially welcomed the government's raid of the Red Mosque last week.

Thirteen PPP workers were killed in the attack and several were injured. The former prime minister condemned the attack in an interview with a local television station and called for an end to the dictatorship.

"If we want to end terrorism," she said, "we have first to bring true democracy to the country. Right now, inflation, unemployment and poverty have increased and people are no longer empowered."

As violence continued to escalate in the country, the military ruler President Musharraf ruled out an emergency situation, saying democracy was the solution and insisting that crucial elections would be held by the end of the year. But political experts fear he will not be able to keep his word.