Pakistani Shiites protest after mosque bombing kills scores
Thousands of Shiite Muslims rallied to protest against the killing of 61 people in a suicide bombing at a mosque, as southern Pakistan shut down to mourn the nation's worst sectarian attack in nearly two years.
Thousands of Shiite Muslims rallied yesterday to protest against the killing of 61 people in a suicide bombing at a mosque, as southern Pakistan shut down to mourn the nation's worst sectarian attack in nearly two years.
The blast hit the mosque in the Shikarpur district of southern Sindh province, about 470km north of Pakistan's biggest city Karachi, as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers.
Police said the bomber detonated the explosives strapped to his body "in the middle of the mosque".
"The bomber selected a place in the mosque that would cause huge destruction," Raja Umar Khitab, a police official in Sindh's counter-terror department, said yesterday.
Khitab said the bomb was loaded with steel pellets, ball bearings and other shrapnel to cause maximum damage.
The provincial government announced yesterday as a day of mourning, closing schools, shops and offices, with no public transport available on the roads.
In Shikarpur, thousands gathered to attend funeral prayers for the dead.
Karachi, Pakistan's economic heart and Sindh's provincial capital, also shut down for the day, with hundreds of Shiites staging protest rallies.
Pakistan has suffered a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiites, who make up around 20 per cent of the population. Friday's bombing was the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since March 2013, when a car bomb in a Shiite neighbourhood of Karachi killed 45.
A spokesman for the shadowy Jandullah militant group, a splinter faction of the Pakistani Taliban, said they were behind the latest blast.
About 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, with many of the attacks claimed by the hardline Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
