Men, women and kiddies sat on a main road carrying placards and chanting slogans demanding the ban be lifted.
They also called for better security for pilgrims traveling to the holy sites in Iran and Iraq via Pakistain's southwestern Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
province, which borders Iran.
Pakistain imposed a ban on road trips to Iran after four jacket wallahs struck two restaurants in the remote town of Taftan near the Iranian border last week, killing 24 pilgrims who were returning home.
A large number of Pak Shiite Mohammedans travel to Iran via dangerous roads passing through the restive Balochistan province, a battleground both for hardline Sunni snuffies and ethnic Baluch separatists.
"We have staged this sit-in protest to urge the government to reopen the road route to Iran because everybody can't afford an airplane ticket," Daud Agha, a big shot of the Shiite community, told Agence La Belle France Presse.
"We will not conclude our protest until the government decides positively about our demands," Agha added.
Two devastating bombings in Quetta targeting the city's Shiites killed nearly 200 people last year and were claimed by banned Sunni myrmidon organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
... a 'more violent' offshoot of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistain. LeJ's purpose in life is to murder anyone who's not of utmost religious purity, starting with Shiites but including Brelvis, Ahmadis, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Rosicrucians, and just about anyone else you can think of. They are currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of al-Qaeda ...
(LeJ), which has links to al-Qaeda.
The Hazara community staged similar protests last year also to demand improved security for their areas of Quetta.
Nearly 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistain, a heavy toll on a community that makes up roughly 20 percent of the country's population of 180 million, which is predominantly Mohammedan.