Two bombs planted in a car and motorcycle exploded at a gathering of Sunni Muslim radicals in central Pakistan before dawn yesterday, killing at least 40 people and wounding about 100 others in what police suspected was a sectarian attack.
The blasts ripped through a crowd of mourners leaving the overnight rally attended by several thousand in the city of Multan to mark the first anniversary of the shooting of extremist Sunni religious leader Azam Tariq, who was gunned down on the outskirts of Islamabad last October.
PHOTO: EPA
"It was dark and people were screaming for help," said one witness. "It was utter chaos."
About 2,000 angry Sunnis gathered outside a hospital where victims of the explosions in the city of Multan were taken, shouting "Shiites are infidels!" and slogans against the government, witnesses said.
The bombings came less than a week after a suicide attack left 31 dead at a Shiite mosque in the eastern city of Sialkot on Oct. 2 and Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said it could have been a sectarian act of revenge.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz convened an emergency meeting and the Interior Ministry would propose a ban on large religious gatherings, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said.
The rally had ended and people were dispersing in pre-dawn darkness from a meeting ground in the Rasheedabad area when the car bomb exploded, said Sikander Hayat, police chief in Multan.
Two minutes later a second bomb attached to a motorcycle went off, deputy city police chief Arshad Hameed said.
Large patches of blood stained the ground and pieces of flesh lay scattered around. Nearby houses and shops were damaged.
Jamil Usmani, 26, who had been standing in a nearby parking lot with friends, said a stampede after the bombing caused many injuries.
"The explosion numbed our ears, we saw people falling on each other, everybody was crying, everybody was running," he said. "Many people were injured in the stampede, we started picking them up and asked passing cars for help."
Most of the casualties were followers of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (Soldiers of Mohammad's Companions), an outlawed Sunni group that Tariq headed and which has been blamed for many bloody attacks on Shiites, who make up about 15 percent of Pakistan's mainly Sunni population of 150 million.
Sipah-e-Sahaba was one of seven militant groups outlawed by Musharraf after he joined the US-led war on terror following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
Like other such organizations, it took another name after being banned -- Millat-e-Islamia (Islamic Nation). The leader of the renamed group, Maulana Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, blamed Shiite radicals for the blast.
He appealed to his followers to remain calm. But addressing thou-sands gathered to offer funeral prayers, he demanded that the government track down those responsible within a week or he would call for a march on Islamabad.
Abdul Jalil Naqvi, a leader of the main Shiite militant group, the ban-ned Islami Tehrik Pakistan, denied the attack was carried out by Shiites and said it was an act of terrorism aimed at inciting a sectarian war.
"We condemn it," he said.
Officials said about 1,000 police were called from other areas, and soldiers were patrolling the city.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS