Obama says "deeply concerned" over Pakistan attack

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States was deeply concerned by an attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan and the U.S. State Department called it a "vicious attack on innocent civilians."

A dozen gunmen attacked the team's bus with rifles, grenades and rockets on its way to Lahore's Gaddafi stadium, wounding six players and a British coach and killing at least eight Pakistanis, Pakistani officials said.

"The details are still coming in, and so I don't want to be too specific," Obama told reporters after meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. "Obviously we're deeply concerned."

State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid condemned the incident as a "vicious attack on innocent civilians" as well as the positive relations between Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Bomb and gun attacks, mostly carried out by Islamist militants linked to the Taliban or al Qaeda, have become commonplace in Pakistan in recent years.

Speaking more generally, Obama said, "Both Great Britain and the United States share a deep interest in ensuring that neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan are safe havens for terrorist activity."

"The truth is that the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated, the safe havens for al Qaeda remain in the frontier regions of Pakistan and we are conducting currently a comprehensive review of our policies," he said.

Obama said the review looked at U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan and coordination with NATO allies and other members of the international security force in Afghanistan.

He said he would make announcements ahead of the NATO summit in April about "the direction the United States would like to go."

The foreign ministers of Pakistan and Afghanistan held talks with each other and with senior U.S. officials in Washington last month and agreed there was a new sense of trust between them that would help them fight the militants.

(Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by David Storey)