The death toll from a pair of overnight bombings at a busy market in a Shiite-dominated region of northwest Pakistan rose to 57, officials said yesterday.
As many as 167 people were also wounded in Friday’s apparent sectarian attacks in the town of Parachinar, which sits in the Kurram tribal area that borders Afghanistan to the west, hospital official Shabir Hussain and Shiite leader Hamid Ali said.
Hussain said almost all the dead and wounded were Shiites. There was no claim of responsibility, but authorities have blamed militant groups belonging to the Sunni Muslim majority for previous gun and bomb attacks against the Shiite minority.
Photo: EPA
Ali said the market was full of Shiites, who were buying items for their evening meal that breaks the daytime fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
“We demand protection. We request the government to take action against those who routinely kill our people,” he said.
Another doctor Zahid Hussain earlier said the dead bodies quickly overwhelmed Parachinar’s main hospital, where a large numbers of people sought medical attention after the blasts.
“We have no place to keep the wounded,” he said late on Friday. “Many of them are lying on the hospital floor and on the lawn.”
The apparently coordinated bombs hit the main bazaar as people were doing their evening shopping before the iftar meal, police spokesman Fazal Naeem Khan said. One bomb was believed to have been planted on a motorcycle, he said.
The second bomb detonated about four minutes after the first, about 365 meters away from the initial blast, government official Javed Ali said.
One man, Said Hussain, who was in the area where the second blast struck, reported seeing a teenage boy shout: “God is great!” just a few moments before the explosion.
Pakistan is a majority Sunni Muslim state, with around 15 percent of the population Shiite. Most Sunnis and Shiites live together peacefully in Pakistan, though tensions have existed for decades. The Sunni-Shiite schism over the true heir to Islam’s Prophet Mohammed dates back to the 7th century.
Meanwhile, assailants attacked a Pakistani border guard post in a remote southwestern town early yesterday, killing seven security personnel and wounding as many others, senior government officer Akbar Hussain Durrani said.
He said that the attack took place near Sunsater, near Iran, and that authorities were trying to get more details to determine who was behind it.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not