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Suicide attack kills 5 at Pakistan Shiite mosque
AFP - Monday, December 28
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Suicide attack kills 5 at Pakistan Shiite mosque
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (AFP) - – A suicide attack at a Shiite Muslim mosque in Pakistani-administered Kashmir killed five people and wounded dozens more late Sunday, marking a bloody start to Ashura commemorations.
The attack in Muzaffarabad came as Pakistan put tens of thousands of security forces on alert, fearing sectarian clashes and militant attacks as millions of Shiites marked the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein.
Police said the bomber tried to enter the mosque, which was crowded with Shiites gathering to pray on the eve of Ashura in Pakistan.
Panic broke after the blast, which flung a severed leg and other body parts across the ground outside the mosque as the power went off, witnesses said.
"The bomber came in front of me. He was accompanying the procession. Police searched everybody on the gate and the bomber blew himself during the body search," said Atif Bashir, a medical store owner with a bandaged forehead.
"All of a sudden the electricity cut. There was panic and people were crying for help," he told AFP at the bomb site.
Officials said five people were killed and 81 wounded in what was a rare suicide attack in Pakistan's zone of the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, over which Pakistan and India have fought two of their three wars.
"It was a suicide attack. Five people have died, two of them were civilians and three were policemen," said Chaudhry Imtiaz, deputy commissioner.
"Eighty-one people were wounded, 10 of them seriously. The bomber was trying to enter inside the Imambargah. Policemen sacrificed their lives and saved people," he added.
Ashura rituals see faithful in black march through the streets, flailing themselves with chains to commemorate the killing of Imam Hussein by armies of the Sunni caliph Yazid in 680.
Shiites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167 million. More than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the late 1980s.
Kashmir was split into two in the bloody aftermath of independence in the subcontinent from Britain in 1947. Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan each control a part of the mountainous land but both claim the region in full.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in a nearly 20-year revolt in Indian Kashmir, where Muslim militants have fought against New Delhi's rule.
India has accused Pakistan of arming and funding militants waging the insurgency in Kashmir, although Islamabad denies the charges.
"This is the third suicide attack in (Pakistani-administered) Kashmir. The whole country is under threat and we are facing the same situation. We have taken extraordinary security measures," said police official Tahir Qayyum.
Militant attacks have killed more than 2,700 people since July 2007 and Washington is pressuring Pakistan to do more to crack down on Al-Qaeda and stop insurgents crossing the border to attack Western troops in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan's financial capital of Karachi, where 20,000 policemen and paramilitary Rangers were deployed, explosives planted in a gutter ripped through an Ashura procession, wounding 17 people, officials said.
"The explosives had been put in the gutter. They exploded when the Shiite procession was passing," said Karachi police official Fayyaz Ahmad Qureshi.
"We have received 17 injured. There is one child and four policemen among the wounded," said doctor Jamil Ashfaq.
Officials in Pakistan's capital Islamabad and other cities said security forces were on alert, with the army on standby.
In Lahore, Pakistan's most liberal city hit by a rising number of suicide and gun attacks, more than 25,000 police were on duty, officials said.
In northwest metropolis Peshawar, where 18 bomb attacks linked to the Taliban have struck in three months, 11,000 police and paramilitary personnel were on guard to protect processions, police said.
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