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Monday, March 4, 2013

PAKISTAN | The deadliest attack in the past three years A bombing in a Shiite neighborhood of Karachi left at least 45 dead and hundreds of injured


At least 45 people have been killed and 149 others wounded in a bombing in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in the city of Karachi in southern Pakistan, police said. It was the deadliest attack in three years in the country's economic capital. The attack with what appears to be a car bomb occurred as worshipers were leaving a mosque. Soon after, there was another explosion, whose origin is unknown, according to AFP. The attack, whose author remains unknown, occurred at 19:30 local time, a police official in Abbas Town neighborhood, where the tragedy occurred, said that "it is possible to increase the number of deaths". More than a hundred shops and apartments have been destroyed by the blast. Another source of Karachi Police explained that the two bombs exploded within five minutes of each other and the first one was placed on a motorcycle parked in the street. Local media put the number of dead and require that the attack took place near a mosque. Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, condemned the attack and said in a statement that "the targeting of innocent civilians serve the interests of opposites of state and society" .The sectarian attacks have increased in the last year within a general upsurge of terrorist violence in Pakistan. Three months ago a suicide motorcycle bomber killed three people in front of a Shiite confession cult center of this minority branch of Islam in the same neighborhood of the port city of Karachi, the most populous Asian country. In two of the worst sectarian massacres in Pakistan's history, more than 200 people died the past months of January and February in two almost identical attacks perpetrated against the Shi'a community in the western city of Quetta. These killings have provoked angry protests from the Shiite minority (about 20% of the population), but Pakistani authorities are impotent to stop the bleeding growing religious group that suffers.

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