At least 41 people were killed and more than 150 injured in the south-west Pakistan city of Quetta yesterday when three men raked a procession of Shia worshippers with machine-gun fire and lobbed grenades, then blew themselves up. Hundreds of members of Quetta’s sizeable Shia minority were processing through the city when the attacks took place. They provoked a rampage by Shia youths, who set on fire a mosque, a television network office and several Sunni-owned shops.
The mayor, Abdul Rahim Kakar, said the three unidentified assailants threw grenades at the worshippers and raked them with machine gun fire. They then walked into the crowd and blew themselves up, he said. Two of the raiders died, the third was in a critical condition. Government officials blamed the attack on Sunni fundamentalist groups which have traditionally attacked the Shia in Pakistan. Witnesses said the attackers’ guns were painted with the name of the outlawed Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has carried out many sectarian attacks in the past. "We suspect this is the work of the usual suspects, like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, but it’s not clear what their objective was," a Shia leader, Abdul Jalil Naqvi, said.
| My guess would be that the objective was to kill a large number of Shiites. My question is whether it was an activity coordinated with the festivities in Iraq. My suspicion is that it was. |
The information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said: "Obviously, the purpose was to create unrest. This a sad incident, and we condemn it." The city was under an emergency curfew last night as officials tried to prevent the sectarian reprisals spiralling. Announcing the curfew, the mayor said the security situation was under control. But a police officer, Khyzar Hayyat, said gunshots continued to be heard nearly an hour after the killings. "The situation is very bad," he said. Riaz Khan,the Quetta police chief, said a Sunni mosque was set alight and partially destroyed, and there had been an exchange of fire between Shia gunmen and unidentified rivals.
| That's what was supposed to happen... |
Ijaz Khan, a reporter for the private television network GEO, said that six unidentified people entered the its office in Quetta and set it on fire. The office was empty and no one was injured. Last week the network ran a talkshow which is alleged to have included offensive comments against Shia worshippers. The police said a leading suspect for the July attack was the brother-in-law of a terrorist belonging to al-Qaida, Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993.
Several accounts have labeled Ramzi Yousef as being a member of the Sunni sectarian group SeS during his time in Pakistan, where he allegedly married the daughter of one of the SeS’s leaders.
In another incidence of sectarian violence in Pakistan yesterday, two people - one Shia and one Sunni - were killed and 40 people wounded in clashes in Phalia, 100 miles east of the capital, Islamabad. That too began with men opening fire on a Shia procession through the town. Allama Hassan Turabi, a senior Shia leader, called on the president, Pervez Musharraf, to sack members of the government, including the interior minister, for failing to prevent the Quetta attack. "This is not the first attack against us," he said. "Our people are not safe at homes. They are not safe in mosques." |