Pakistan bomb blast kills 12 women

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Originally published Saturday, April 27, 2002

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Hundreds of Shiite Muslims protested in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province Friday after a bomb ripped through one of their mosques, killing 12 worshippers, all of them women, and wounding at least 13 other people.

There was no claim of responsibility for blast, which occurred around midnight Thursday in Bukker, 300 miles southwest of the capital of Islamabad.

Asif Hayyat, the Punjab police chief, described the bombing as an "act of terrorism" and said "foreign elements" could not be ruled out. Police recently arrested a number of al-Qaida suspects in Punjab.

The bomb went off near the section of the mosque where women pray. Mosques are segregated.

"All the dead were women," said Mohammed Nisar, a doctor at the only hospital in Bukker. He spoke by telephone.

Hospital superintendent Faiz Mohammed Awan confirmed 12 people were killed and 13 wounded.

Troubled region

Pakistan, and eastern Punjab province in particular, has been wracked by religiously motivated violence in recent years. Hundreds of people have been killed in violent attacks between rival radical elements belonging to the Sunni and Shiite sects of Islam.

Hundreds belonging to the Shiite community demonstrated Friday in Bukker, chanting slogans against a rival Sunni group.

In a TV interview recorded earlier but aired Friday night, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said intelligence agencies are being reinforced to pre-empt such sectarian killings.

"The agencies will be equipped to stave off terrorist acts throughout the country", Musharraf said.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International urged the government to reform Islamic schools that provide military training, "reduce the glut of arms and to prosecute and punish anyone found responsible for religiously motivated violence."

A senior leader of the outlawed Shi'ite group Tehrik-e-Jafria, Ali Raza Gardezi, said that the attack on innocent women and children was aimed at creating unrest and sectarian disharmony.

"We hope and expect that those responsible for the bomb explosion will be given exemplary punishment", Gardezi said.

The usual culprits in the killing of Shiite Muslims have been members of the violent Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) or Guardians of the Friends of the Prophet group, banned by Musharraf. The organization reviles Shiite Muslims as outside the pale of Islam.

Since January dozens of Shiite Muslims have been killed in Pakistan. Many of the deaths have been target killings and have occurred both in the Punjab province and in the country's southern Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital.

In the last one week in Karachi, a Shiite Muslim doctor was shot and killed as well as the Shiite Muslim owner of a pharmacy. No arrests have been made in the two drive-by shootings. It's not known if the killings were carried out by the same people or organization.

Previously Hasan Turabi, the head of Tehrik-e-Jafria, blamed the upsurge in killings of Shiite Muslims on the return to Pakistan of militant Sunni Muslims from neighboring Afghanistan following the collapse of the hardline Taliban.

Turabi said the Taliban, a movement dominated by Sunni Muslims, espoused the same philosophy as Pakistan's radical Sunni Muslims, and harbored those who had killed Shiite Muslims in Pakistan. With the fall of the Taliban these radical elements returned home, he said.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

back to Terror in America index