60 killed in blast at Shiite mosque
Print Edition
A POWERFUL bomb tore through a busy Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan yesterday, killing more than 60 people in the country’s deadliest sectarian attack in nearly two years.
The blast hit the mosque in Shikarpur in Sindh province, around 470 kilometers north of Karachi, as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers.
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 around one in five of the population.
Sindh Health Minister Jam Mehtab Daher said that “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.
Shaukat Ali Memon, the medical superintendent of Civil Hospital in Shikarpur, earlier gave a death toll of 48.
Hundreds of people rushed to the scene after the blast to try to dig out survivors trapped under the roof of the mosque, which collapsed in the explosion, witness Zahid Noon said.
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,” Noon said.
“A huge contingent of police and rangers is present here and ambulances from the nearby towns have started to arrive.”
Local resident Mohammad Jehangir said that he had “felt the earth move beneath my feet” as he prayed at another mosque around 1.5 kilometers away.
An official with a national Shiite organization, Rahat Kazmi, said up to 400 people were worshipping in the mosque when the blast struck.
Sainrakhio Mirani, police chief of the region, said officers were still working to determine whether it was a suicide bombing or whether the 6-7 kilogram bomb was detonated remotely.
It is 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 blast. “We claim responsibility for attack on Shiites in Shikarpur very happily,” Ahmed Marwat said.
Locals said many people lost relatives in the attack.
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