By Fida Hussain ,AFP
January 31, 2015, 12:00 am TWN
SHIKARPUR, Pakistan -- A bomb tore through a busy Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan on Friday killing at least 61 people, officials said, in the deadliest sectarian attack to hit the country in nearly two years.
The blast hit the mosque in Shikarpur in Sindh province, around 470 kilometers (300 miles) 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 hard-line Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiite Muslims, who make up around one in five of the population.
Sindh health minister Jam Mehtab Daher earlier told AFP that “a total of 40 have been killed in the attack, 46 others have been wounded.”
Shaukat Ali Memon, the medical superintendent of Civil Hospital in Shikarpur, confirmed the death toll and warned it could rise further as many of the wounded were in a critical condition.
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.”
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.
Rising Tide of Violence
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 March 2013, when a car bomb in a Shiite neighborhood of Karachi killed 45.
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 heart, has wrestled for several years with a bloody wave of criminal, sectarian and politician murders.
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