50 killed in Pakistani mosque blast

A powerful bomb tore through a busy Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan today, killing close to 50 people in the country’s deadliest sectarian attack in nearly two years.

The blast hit the mosque in Shikarpur in Sindh province, around 470km north of Karachi, as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers.

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.

Shaukat Ali Memon, the medical superintendent of Civil Hospital in Shikarpur, gave a death toll of 48.

Earlier, Sindh health minister Jam Mehtab Daher told AFP that “a total of 40 have been killed in the attack, 46 others have been wounded”.

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 explosion, 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.”

HUNDREDS WORSHIPPING

Local resident Mohammad Jehangir told AFP he had “felt the earth move beneath my feet” as he prayed at another mosque around 1.5 kilometres away.

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

Sainrakhio Mirani, police chief of the region told AFP officers were still working to determine whether it was a suicide bombing or whether the 6-7 kilogramme bomb was detonated remotely.

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

A spokesman for the shadowy Jandullah militant group, a splinter faction of the Pakistani Taliban, said they were behind the blast.

“We claim responsibility for attack on Shiites in Shikarpur very happily,” Ahmed Marwat told AFP.

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.