The blast, one day after the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, took place close to the Data Darbar, one of the largest shrines in South Asia.
"It was an attack on police that left several dead and dozens of policemen and civilians injured. The target was police," said Syed Mubashir Hussain, a spokesman for the Lahore police.
The attack follows a period of relative calm in the city, where attacks were at one time common.
No casualty details were immediately available but the Dawn newspaper reported that at least three people had been killed.
"A rescue operation is under way and we have shifted 15 people to hospital," said Muhammad Farooq, a spokesman for the city’s rescue services.
| Update at 12:30p.m. EDT from Al Ahram: |
The blast, a day after the beginning of the Moslem holy month of Ramadan, went off at a police checkpoint near the Data Darbar, one of the largest Moslem shrines in South Asia, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.
The attack was claimed by the Hizbul Ahrar, a splinter group of the Pak Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
, a movement that has been fighting the government for years. In a statement, the group said the attack targeted police and had been timed to avoid civilian casualties.
Sufis, who follow a mystical form of Islam that has been practised in South Asia for centuries, have been regularly attacked by hardline Sunni Moslem turbans in the past.
In 2010, two jacket wallahs struck the Data Darbar shrine killing 42 people and wounding 175, in an attack officials said was carried out by the Pak Taliban.
Militant violence has since declined sharply in Pakistain after a sustained crackdown following the country's deadliest attack in 2014, which killed more than 150 people, many children, at a school in the western city of Beautiful Downtown Peshawar
...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.Since an attack in a Lahore park targeting Christians celebrating Easter in 2016 killed more than 70 people, Pakistain's second largest city has been largely quiet although an attack last year killed nine people.
Police said a general security alert was in force but there had been no specific warning about a threat to the Data Darbar, which protected by heavy layers of security.
The complex contains the shrine of Syed Ali bin-Osman al-Hajvery, widely known as Data Ganj Bakhsh, an 11th century Sufi preacher originally from Ghazni in what is now Afghanistan.