  We report the serendipitous discovery of a 7-s X-ray pulsar using data
acquired with the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics. The pulsar
is detected as an unresolved source located towards a region of the Galactic
plane (l,b ~ 29.5, 0.08) that coincides with an overdensity of star-formation
tracers. The signal suffers tremendous foreground absorption, equivalent to N_H
~ 10E23 cm^-2; the absorption correlates well with a line-of-sight that is
tangential to the inner spiral arms and the 4-kpc molecular ring. The pulsar is
not associated with any known supernova remnants or other cataloged objects in
that direction. The near sinusoidal pulse (period P ~ 6.9712) is modulated at
35% pulsed amplitude, and the steep spectrum is characteristic of hot
black-body emission with temperature kT ~ 0.65 keV. We characterize the source
as an anomalous X-ray pulsar (AXP).
