Pakistan Shia mosque bombing kills dozens

Deadliest sectarian attack in nearly two years came during Friday prayers at mosque in Shikarpur, Sindh province

Agence France-Presse in Shikarpur-Friday 30 January 2015

A bomb blast at a Shia mosque in southern Pakistan has killed at least 40 people and wounded dozens more, officials said, in the deadliest sectarian attack to hit the country in nearly two years.

The bomb exploded as worshippers attended Friday prayers in the town of Shikarpur, in Sindh province, around 300 miles (470km) north of Karachi.

Pakistan has been hit by a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it by hardline Sunni Muslim groups targeting Shia Muslims, who make up about one in five of the population.

The Sindh provincial health minister, Jam Mehtab, said at least 40 people were killed and 46 were injured.

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 blast. Television footage of the aftermath showed chaotic rescue scenes as people piled the wounded into cars, motorbikes and rickshaws to take them for treatment.

An official with a national Shia organisation, Rahat Kazmi, said that up to 400 people were worshipping in the mosque when the blast struck.

It is the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since March 2013, when a car bomb in a Shia neighbourhood of Karachi killed 45.

Friday’s attack came as the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, visited Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, to discuss the law-and-order situation in the city.

Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city and economic heartbeat, has wrestled for several years with a wave of criminal, sectarian and political murders.

Pakistan has stepped up its fight against militants in the past month, following a Taliban massacre at a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Heavily armed gunmen went from room to room at the army-run school, murdering 150 people, most of them children, in an attack that horrified the world.

Since then the government has ended a six-year moratorium on executions in terror-related cases and pledged to crack down on all militant groups.