Gujrat  - Gunmen martyred eight security men Monday at a riverside military encampment close to the industrial city of Wazirabad, where such militant activity is rare.A military rescue party had camped by the river Chenab to look for the body of an army major who was flying a helicopter that crashed in the area in May.Unidentified militants opened fire from a nearby bridge and then stormed the camp at 5:20am, after a protest march against the resumption of Nato supply convoys passed through the area.The roughly half a dozen gunmen who attacked the camp were riding in a car and on motorcycles. They killed six soldiers at the camp and a policeman who tried to intercept them as they were escaping, said Basharat Mahmood, the police chief of Gujrat – the town near the scene of the attack. Four policemen and at least three soldiers were injured, he added.The bodies and injured were shifted to Combined Military Hospital (CMH) Gujranwala for medical aid where another troop succumbed to his wounds, raising the death toll to eight.The militants had also planted a time device near the camp which exploded with a loud bang but no further losses were reported. The attackers then fled the scene. After the incident, police parties began a hunt for the attackers. The exact number of attackers and their identity was unknown.Hours earlier, thousands from the Defence of Pakistan Council (DCC), a coalition of hardline religious groups, crossed the bridge on a “long march” from Lahore to Islamabad to protest against the reopening of NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. The convoy of busses, trucks and cars had stopped for the night in Gujrat, across the river Chenab from Wazirabad, and they were to reach Islamabad on Monday afternoon.“The DCC supporters passed through the area some time before the attack, but linking the two is speculation at this point,” a Gujrat Police official Nadeem Abbas said. Police were searching for the attackers and it was unclear if any of the Islamist protesters were involved, said police chief Basharat Mahmood. “It is surely a terrorist attack… The attackers could have taken cover. They could have hid themselves among the protesters.”Such attacks are more common in northwest Pakistan, home to several militant groups, including the Taliban, but rare in Punjab, a relatively affluent part of the country. Some extremist groups are based in the poorer southern part of Punjab, but are not known to attack security forces.“There are criminal groups active in the area, they could be involved. Or it could be militants, which could be a serious development,” a senior Pakistani security official told Reuters. “We are not ruling anything out.”A senior security official told AFP on condition of anonymity, “It is highly likely that the attackers belonged to a banned religious outfit, which is hand in glove with the Taliban… Nobody has so far claimed responsibility of the attack but if we follow the pattern of the attack, it looks similar to assaults that these outfits have been carrying out in different cities.”