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| India-Pakistan |
| Eight killed in Pakistan shrine bombing: police |
| 2010-10-07 |
| Eight worshippers including two children were killed in twin bomb blasts Thursday at a packed Sufi shrine in Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi, officials told AFP. Senior police official Hamid Parhial gave the toll, adding that 65 people were also injured, and said it was a suspected suicide attack. The bombs exploded Thursday at the entrance of the shrine to Sufi saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi as devotees packed it for a weekly gathering in Karachi's seaside Clifton district. Provincial home minister Zulfikar Mirza said an investigation into the attack was already underway and the government had decided to seal all shrines in the city immediately over security fears. "It was a terrorist attack," he said. The shrine's floor was spattered in blood, said witnesses. Slippers, sandals and flowers brought by devotees to lay at the tomb littered the area. Witness Gul Mohammad said he was outside the shrine when two huge blasts were heard in quick succession. "I rushed inside and saw blood and human flesh," he said. "Some bodies were lying on the ground and several people wounded in the blasts were crying in pain. Then ambulances started arriving and moving the injured to hospitals." Ambulances with sirens blaring were seen ferrying casualties to hospitals as police and paramilitary soldiers cordoned off the shrine. Doctor Seemin Jamali of Civil Hospital Karachi said 10 women and seven children with serious injuries were among those admitted. There was no claim of responsibility for the latest attack but the Pakistani Taliban has been blamed for similar bombings in the past. More than 3,700 people have been killed in a series of suicide attacks and bomb explosions, many of them carried out by the Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist extremists, in Pakistan during the last three years. |
| Posted by:tipper |