PAKISTAN’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani yesterday swiftly condemned a suicide blast in Karachi, which killed at least 20 worshippers and injured scores more.
A suicide bomber yesterday struck Pakistan’s largest procession of Shiite Muslims on the holiest day in their calendar, killing 20 people and wounding dozens more, defying a major security clampdown.
Gilani also appealed to the country to remain peaceful .
The blast unleashed pandemonium in one of the biggest boulevards in the financial capital, where angry mourners threw stones and fired into the air, sparking appeals from authorities for calm.
“My sister, her husband and children are dead,” said one mourner, weeping profusely and beating his chest as he fled the bomb site.
Pakistan had deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces, fearing sectarian clashes or militant bombings would target the Shiite faithful who whip themselves to mourn the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein.
“It was a suicide attack. He was walking with the procession and he blew himself up,” Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik told private television, while also making an appeal to the Shiite community to suspend their commemorations.
“This pattern shows that this was a joint venture between Tehreek-e- Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi,” Malik told Dunya television, referring to two of Pakistan’s most potent Islamist militant networks.
Ambulances raced through the streets, ferrying people to hospitals.
“At least 20 people were martyred and more than 60 wounded,” provincial health minister Saghir Ahmed said.
“We have declared emergency at all hospitals in Karachi and doctors are making every effort to save the injured. The situation is grim.”
It was the second bomb attack to mar Ashura in Pakistan after a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a main Shiite mosque in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, killing seven people late on Sunday.
Fire broke out after the blast in Karachi, fanning thick smoke into the sky, and people were running in all directions, a witness said.
Two further explosions were heard, which could have been fuel tanks exploding in burning vehicles, and mourners torched a bus, which had blocked off a road for the procession, witnesses said.
In Karachi, the capital of Sindh, more than 50000 Shiites had poured into the streets for Ashura.
Sectarian violence periodically flares in Pakistan between Shiites, who beat and whip themselves in religious fervour at Ashura, and the country’s majority Sunnis, who oppose the public display of grief.
Security has plummeted over the past two-and-a-half years in Pakistan, where militant attacks have killed more than 2700 people since July 2007 and Washington has put the country on the frontline of its war on al-Qaeda.
Shiites account for about 20% of Pakistan’s mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167-million. More than 4000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the late 1980s. Sapa-AFP