PAKISTAN: At least 44 people were killed when suspected Sunni Muslim radicals attacked rival Shias with automatic rifles and grenades in Pakistan yesterday as the minority sect marked one of its holiest days.
Hospital sources said more than 150 people were wounded in the suicide attack in the southwestern city of Quetta, which coincided with bomb blasts in Iraq.
Quetta's military hospital had 25 dead and at least 115 wounded, 20 of them in serious condition, a doctor there said.
A doctor at the Civil Hospital said it had received 19 bodies, including those of two attackers, and 41 wounded, seven of them in serious condition including one suspected attacker.
"Most of the casualties were from gunfire, explosions and stampede," he said.
The attackers struck on the day on which Shias hold processions to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the most important figures in Shia history.
In a separate incident in Pakistan, the local leader of an outlawed Shia group was shot dead and more than 30 Shias were wounded in a clash with majority Sunnis, police said.
The attack on a Shia procession in the centre of Quetta was the worst outbreak of sectarian violence in Pakistan since a suicide attack on a Shia mosque in the same city killed more than 57 people in July.
"Terrorists started firing from a balcony on participants in the procession," and armed men from the Shia Hazara community fired back, a police deputy inspector general, Mr Riaz Khan, said. Another police officer said the attackers had also thrown hand-grenades.
"When the terrorists saw themselves surrounded, at least two of them blew themselves up," Mr Khan said. "I saw their bodies dangling from the balcony over the electricity wires."
Witnesses said the attackers' guns were painted with the name of the outlawed Sunni group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has carried out many sectarian attacks in the past.
"We suspect this is the work of the usual suspects like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, but it's not clear what their objective was," a Shia leader, Mr Abdul Jalil Naqvi, told Reuters.
Shias immediately went on the rampage in Quetta, burning more than 100 shops. Troops were sent in to restore order and imposed a curfew. - (Reuters)