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Bomb attack at Pakistani mosque kills at least 20: Officials
A bomb tore through a busy Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan on Friday killing at least 20 people, officials said, in the deadliest sectarian attack to hit the country in a year
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bomb tore through a busy Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan on Fridaykilling at least 20 people, officials said, in the deadliest sectarian attackto hit the country in a year.
The blast hit the mosque in Shikarpur in Sindh province, around 470 kilometers north of Karachi, as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers wounding more than 70.
Pakistan has suffered a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiite Muslims, who make up around one in five of the population.
Sindh health minister Jam Mehtab Daher told AFP that "at least 20 people are dead and 73 others were wounded," adding that 23 of the worst injured had been moved to larger towns with better-equipped hospitals.
Shaukat Ali Memon, the medical superintendent of Civil Hospital in Shikarpur, confirmed the death toll.
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, witness Zahid Noon said.
Television footage of the aftermath showed chaotic rescue scenes as people piled the wounded into cars, motorbikes and rickshaws to take them for treatment.
"The area is scattered with blood and flesh and it smells of burnt meat, people are screaming at each other... it is chaos," Noon told AFP.
"A huge contingent of police and rangers is present here and ambulances from the nearby towns have started to arrive."
Local resident Mohammad Jehangir told AFP he had "felt the earth move beneath my feet" as he prayed at another mosque around 1.5 kilometers away.
An official with a national Shiite organization, Rahat Kazmi, told AFP that up to 400 people were worshipping in the mosque when the blast struck.
Abdul Quddus, a senior police official in Shikarpur, told AFP the initial investigation suggested it may have been a suicide attack.
It is the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since Jan. 22 last year, when 24 Shiite pilgrims returning from Iran were killed when their bus was bombed in southwestern Baluchistan province.
Friday's attack came as 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 bloody wave of criminal, sectarian and politician murders.
Anti-Shiite attacks have been increasing in recent years in Karachi and also in the southwestern city of Quetta, the northwestern area of Parachinar and the far northeastern town of Gilgit.
Around 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, a heavy toll, with many of the attacks claimed by the hardline Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).
A report by the US Institute of Peace this week warned that sectarian militant groups were growing in strength in rural areas of Sindh, a province which has escaped much of the worst of the violence that has wracked Pakistan over the last decade.
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. (+++++)
