55 killed in bombing of mosque in Pakistan - Boston Globe

Pakistani protesters condemned a deadly bombing of a Shi’ite mosque 300 miles north of Karachi on Friday.

KARACHI — An explosion ripped through a Shi’ite mosque in southern Pakistan during weekly prayers Friday, killing 55 people and wounding at least 59 in an apparent suicide bombing, police said.

The bombing in Shikarpur, about 300 miles north of Karachi, was the country’s worst sectarian attack in months. It offered further proof that extremists are spreading deep into Sindh province, which had previously escaped the worst of Pakistan’s violence.

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Television images from the scene showed bloodied worshipers being carried from the mosque in the city’s Lakhi Dar district.

The attack appeared to have been carried out by a suicide bomber, said Abdul Quddus, a police officer in Shikarpur.

Jundullah, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, said it was responsible for the attack.

“Our target was the Shi’ite community,” Fahad Marwat, a spokesman for the group, told Reuters. “They are our enemies.”

Although sectarian violence has risen across Pakistan in recent years, such attacks have been relatively rare in Sindh, which has a long tradition of tolerance among religious groups.

But that harmony has come under threat with a recent expansion of sectarian groups that use mosques and seminaries to spread hatred of Shi’ites. One of the most prominent such groups, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, was banned by the Pakistani government in 2012.

In a statement, former president Asif Ali Zardari, who comes from Sindh province, said he was “shocked and grieved beyond measure” by the bombing.

Although leaders in Sindh openly acknowledge the growing threat of sectarianism, they seem helpless to stop its expansion, drawing angry criticism from Shi’ite groups.

“It seems like the killing of Shi’ites makes no difference to them,” said Ali Hussain Naqvi, a senior official with Majlis Wahdat-al-Muslimeen, a Shi’ite political party that staged street protests across the province after the bombing.

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