ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani police hunted on Wednesday for gunmen who mounted the bold attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team in Lahore and officials scrambled to figure out who was behind it.

The attack which killed eight people, six of them Pakistani police, plunged Pakistan into a state of war, Rehman Malik, the prime minister's interior adviser, said.

Be patient, we will flush all these terrorists out of the country, he added.

Six members of the Sri Lankan team and a British coach were wounded in the daylight attack as their bus approached the cricket stadium. None was so seriously hurt they had to be left behind when the squad departed for Colombo on Tuesday night.

Pakistan has reeled under a wave of bomb and gun attacks in recent years, mostly carried out by Islamist militants linked to the Taliban or al Qaeda, but arch nationalists would relish a link being found between rival India and latest attack.

The incident had echoes of an attack on the Indian city of Mumbai last November in which around 170 people were killed and which led to the Indian cricket team cancelling its planned tour of Pakistan, and a Sri Lankan team taking its place.

The group blamed by India for the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, came from Pakistan's Punjab province whose capital is Lahore.

The police chief in Punjab province announced some arrests, without saying if any gunmen were among those picked up.

Journalists were shown weapons found at the scene and at other locations, including 10 AK-47 rifles, two rocket grenade launchers, 32 handgrenades and plastic explosives.

They were determined ... it was a thoroughly prepared operation, police chief Khuwaja Khalid Farooq said.

The United States wants Pakistan focused on fighting terrorism, but there are worries that President Asif Ali Zardari's civilian government could be engulfed by multiple crises less than a year after taking power.

U.S. President Barack Obama said he was deeply concerned about the attack.

Aside from militancy radiating across the northwest from the borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan desperately needs billions of dollars of aid to supplement a bail out by the International Monetary Fund last November.

Pakistan has arrested a few LeT members. India and other governments are watching to see how forcefully Pakistan follows through on its investigation as LeT has had close ties with Pakistani intelligence agencies in the past.

ANYTHING BUT UNITED

Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab Province, initially said the same people who carried out the attack on Mumbai were responsible for the latest in Lahore, but was more circumspect addressing a news conference late on Tuesday.

We are not blaming anybody or holding anybody responsible like India did, Taseer said.

In the next 48 hours things will be clear. We will be able to say who was behind this, he added.

A former Pakistani spy chief with Islamist sympathies speculated that the attack could have been carried out by Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger rebels backed by Indian intelligence as a payback for what happened in Mumbai.

It's all too obvious that it is the handiwork of the Indian intelligence, retired general Hamid Gul said.

Punjab Governor Taseer called for people to unite, but the country is anything but united.

Elections to parliament's upper house, the Senate, will be held on Wednesday under the shadow of a crisis that gripped Pakistan for the past week and sent share prices tumbling.

Zardari dismissed the provincial government in Punjab led by his arch rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, after the Supreme Court decided Sharif and his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif were disqualified from holding elective office.

The Sharifs say Zardari was behind the court decision and their party Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), or PML-N, has begun street agitation in cities across Punjab.

The PML-N plans to add its weight to a mass protest on March 12 by a lawyers' movement fighting for an independent judiciary.

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

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