Pakistani authorities slapped a curfew on a restive northwestern district yesterday after clashes and gunfights left at least seven people dead at a religious procession, officials said.
Sectarian violence erupted on Saturday in the town of Paharpur in Dera Ismail Khan district, as hundreds of Muslims rallied to celebrate Id Milad-un-Nabi, which marks the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday.
Gunmen opened fire on a parade by the Barelvi sect of Sunni Muslims, killing one person on the spot and prompting the angry crowd to retaliate by attacking a seminary of the local Deobandi Sunni sect.
PHOTO: AFP
“Seven people were killed and 38 others have been injured in these incidents. All the dead are Sunni; there are some Shiites among the injured,” district police chief Gul Afzal Afridi told reporters.
Dera Ismail Khan district has in the past been troubled by unrest between followers of the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam, but clashes between Sunni factions are relatively rare.
An official at Dera Ismail Khan hospital confirmed the death toll and said that the 38 people wounded were still being treated.
Authorities early yesterday ordered people to remain in their houses night and day in the main city, also called Dera Ismail Khan, and other parts of the district including Paharpur town.
Security forces were patrolling the streets.
“We have arrested more than 20 suspects and are carrying out more raids. There is a curfew in the main city and some of the outskirts,” Afridi said.
Afridi had refused to comment on Saturday on who might be responsible for the initial shooting, saying the area was troubled by both sectarian unrest and attacks by Islamist militant groups.
Shiites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan’s Sunni-dominated population.
The two communities usually coexist peacefully, but more than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence since the late 1980s.
Attacks by Islamist extremists, meanwhile, have killed more than 3,000 people since July 2007. Most attacks are blamed on the Pakistani Taliban.
In related news, a moderate earthquake deep in the Hindu Kush mountain range jolted parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan early yesterday, but there were no reports of injuries or damage, officials said.
A Pakistani official described a “high-intensity” quake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale, while the US Geological Survey — which monitors earthquakes around the world — reported a 5.7-magnitude quake in the area.
The epicenter was on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush mountain range, and Pakistan’s chief meteorologist Riaz Khan said that the remote location of the earthquake saved both countries from major damage.
Tremors were felt at 4:21am in northwestern Pakistan, with frightened residents of regional capital Peshawar waking up and spilling onto the streets as the ground shook beneath them, a reporter said.
“It was a high intensity major earthquake which lasted for several seconds. The fault line was in an unpopulated area and fortunately we have no reports of any type of damage,” Khan said.
The US Geological Survey said the quake struck 175km northeast of Kabul. The epicenter was about 144km west of Pakistan’s Chitral district, Khan said.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘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
RSS