Sukkur
Pakistan mosque bomb attack kills at least 60, survivors trapped under rubble: officials
Updated about 5 hours agoSat 31 Jan 2015, 7:02am
A bomb blast at a Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan has killed at least 60 people and wounded dozens more, officials said, in the deadliest sectarian attack to hit the country in more than a year.
The bomb exploded as worshippers attended Friday prayers in the town of Shikarpur in Sindh province, about 470 kilometres north of Karachi.
Pakistan has suffered a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiite Muslims, who make up about 20 per cent of the population.
Sindh health minister Jam Mehtab Daher said “the death toll from the attack has increased to 61”.
“There are 54 dead bodies in Shikarpur hospital. Seven others died in Sukkur and Larkana hospitals,” he said.
Witness Zahid Noon said hundreds of people had rushed to the scene to try to dig out survivors trapped under the roof of the mosque, which collapsed in the blast.
Television footage of the aftermath showed chaotic rescue scenes as people piled the wounded into cars, motorbikes and rickshaws to take them for treatment.
“The area is scattered with blood and flesh and it smells of burnt meat, people are screaming at each other… it is chaos,” Mr Noon said.
“A huge contingency of police and rangers is present here and ambulances from the nearby towns have started to arrive.”
Abdul Quddus, a senior police official in Shikarpur, said the initial investigation suggested it may have been a suicide blast.
An official with a national Shiite organisation, Rahat Kazmi, said
up to 400 people were worshipping in the mosque when the blast struck.
Increasing attacks on Shiite targets
It is the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since January 22 last year, when
24 Shiite pilgrims returning from Iran were killed when their bus was bombed in southwestern Baluchistan province.
Friday’s attack came as prime minister Nawaz Sharif visited Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, to discuss the law and order situation in the city.
Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city and economic heartbeat, has wrestled for several years with a bloody wave of criminal, sectarian and politician murders.
Anti-Shiite attacks have been increasing in recent years in Karachi and also in the southwestern city of Quetta, the northwestern area of Parachinar and the far northeastern town of Gilgit.
Around 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, a heavy toll, with many of the attacks claimed by the hardline Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).
Pakistan has stepped up its fight against militants in the past month, following a Taliban massacre at a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
Heavily armed gunmen went from room to room at the army-run school murdering 150 people, most of them children, in an attack that horrified the world.
Since then the government has ended a six-year moratorium on executions in terror-related cases and pledged to crack down on all militant groups.
AFP
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, defence-forces, pakistan, asia
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31056086
Pakistan Shia mosque blast in Shikarpur kills dozens
Dozens of people were wounded in the attackRelated Stories
At least 40 people have been killed in a bomb blast at a Shia mosque in southern Pakistan, officials say.
Dozens were wounded in the attack after Friday prayers in Shikarpur district of Sindh province, and the death toll is expected to rise.
Sunni militants linked to the Pakistani Taliban said they carried out the attack.
Local media reports suggest that the blast could have been a suicide attack, but police are investigating.
There has been rising sectarian violence in Pakistan in recent years. Sunni militant groups have targeted the Shia minority in the past.
The Jundallah militant group claimed that they had carried out the attack. The group has been linked to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and announced allegiance to Islamic State (IS) last year.
A number of people were trapped after the roof of the mosque collapsed due to the force of the explosion, local media said.
Witness Zahid Zoon told AFP news agency that hundreds of people rushed to the scene after the blast to try to dig out survivors from the rubble.
“It is chaos,” he said.
The bomb exploded at a packed mosque just after Friday prayers
Some people were trapped after the roof of the mosque collapsed from the force of the explosionSenior police official Abdul Qudoos Kalwar said that four children were among the dead, according to the Associated Press news agency
Several of the most severely wounded patients were taken to hospitals in the cities of Larkana and Sukkur.
Analysis: BBC’s Ilyas Khan, IslamabadJundallah has been part of TTP and has been linked to militant groups including al-Qaeda as well as an Iranian Sunni Muslim group.
If the Jundallah claim is to be trusted, it would be its second most audacious attack on Shia Muslims in recent years. In 2012, it said it killed at least 18 Shia passengers after pulling them out of a bus in the northern Kohistan region.
The group first hit the headlines in 2004 with an ambush on the army’s Karachi Corps commander. Though it did not claim the attack, the investigators named it and arrested some of its members.
Police in Karachi have blamed some recent attacks on Jundallah , but the group itself has made no comment.
However, some of its recent claims have conflicted with those of the TTP. In June 2013 it said it carried out the killing of nine foreign climbers on Nanga Parbat, but the TTP said a specially established unit called Jundul Hafsa had done it.
Three months later, both Jundallah and Jundul Hafsa claimed the killing of over 70 Christians in a church in Peshawar, but the TTP later said Jundul Hafsa was not involved.
Dr Shaukat Ali Memon, from the hospital in Shikarpur which received the first of those wounded, made an appeal on state television for blood donations.
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has condemned the incident and ordered an immediate inquiry.
The attack came as Mr Sharif visited the city of Karachi, the capital of Sindh province.
The BBC’s Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says that attacks on Shia targets have been fairly common in Karachi, on the coast, but are relatively new in the interior of Sindh province, where the influence of a more tolerant Sufi Islamic tradition is more widespread.
Our reporter says that Friday’s incident is reportedly the fifth attack of a sectarian nature in the province’s interior since 2010.
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