Terror bombings kill 115 across Pakistan

Pool-hall blasts in Shiite area fatal to 81

Pakistani police and others work at the scene of a bombing in Quetta where at least 12 people were killed.
Pakistani police and others work at the scene of a bombing in Quetta where at least 12 people were killed.

— A series of bombings killed 115 people Thursday across Pakistan, including 81 who died in twin blasts at a bustling billiards hall in a Shiite area of the southwestern city of Quetta.

Pakistan’s minority Shiite Muslims have increasingly been targeted by radical Sunnis who consider them heretics, and a militant Sunni group claimed responsibility for Thursday’s deadliest attack — sending a suicide bomber into the packed pool hall and then detonating a car bomb five minutes later.

It was one of the deadliest days in recent years for a country that is no stranger to violence from radical Islamists, militant separatists and criminal gangs.

Violence has been especially intense in southwestern Baluchistan province, where Quetta is the capital and where the country’s largest concentration of Shiites live. Many are ethnic Hazara who migrated from neighboring Afghanistan.

The billiards hall targeted Thursday was in an area dominated by the minority sect. In addition to the 81 dead, more than 120 people were wounded in the double bombing, said police officer Zubair Mehmood. The dead included police officers, journalists and rescue workers who responded to the initial explosion.

Ghulam Abbas, a Shiite who lives about 150 yards from the billiards hall, said he was at home with his family when the first blast occurred. He was trying to decide whether to head to the scene when the second bomb went off.

“The second blast was a deafening one, and I fell down,” he said. “I could hear cries, and minutes later I saw ambulances taking the injured to the hospital.”

Hospitals and a mortuary were overwhelmed as the dead and wounded arrived throughout the evening. Weeping relatives gathered outside the emergency room at Quetta’s Civil Hospital. Inside the morgue, bodies were laid out on the floor.

The bombs severely damaged the three-story building that housed the pool hall and set it on fire. It also damaged nearby shops, homes and offices.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group with strong ties to the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack. Hazara Shiites, who migrated from Afghanistan more than a century ago, have been the targets of dozens of attacks by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in Quetta over the past year, but Thursday’s was by far the bloodiest.

Human Rights Watch sharply criticized the Pakistani government for not doing enough to crack down on the killings and protect the country’s vulnerable Shiite community. It said more than 400 Shiites were killed in targeted attacks in Pakistan in 2012, including more than 120 in Baluchistan.

“2012 was the bloodiest year for Pakistan’s Shia community in living memory, and if this latest attack is any indication, 2013 has started on an even more dismal note,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch.

“As Shia community members continue to be slaughtered in cold blood, the callousness and indifference of authorities offers a damning indictment of the state, its military and security agencies,” Hasan said. “Pakistan’s tolerance for religious extremists is not just destroying lives and alienating entire communities; it is destroying Pakistani society across the board.”

Pakistan’s intelligence agencies helped nurture Sunni militant groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in the 1980s to counter a perceived threat from neighboring Iran, which is mostly Shiite. Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in 2001, but the group continues to operate fairly freely.

Earlier Thursday, a bomb targeting paramilitary soldiers in a commercial area in Quetta killed 12 people and wounded more than 40 others.

The bomb was concealed in a bag and placed near a vehicle carrying paramilitary soldiers, said Akbar Hussain Durrani, the provincial interior secretary. The bag was spotted by a resident, but before the soldiers could react, it was detonated by remote control.

The United Baluch Army, a separatist group, claimed responsibility for the attack in calls to local journalists. Pakistan has faced a violent insurgency in Baluchistan for years from nationalists who demand greater autonomy and a larger share of the country’s natural resources.

Elsewhere in Pakistan, a bomb in a crowded Sunni mosque in the northwest city of Mingora killed 22 people and wounded more than 70, said senior police officer Akhtar Hayyat.

No group claimed responsibility for that attack, but suspicion fell on the Pakistani Taliban, which have waged a bloody insurgency against the government in the Swat Valley, where Mingora is, and other parts of the northwest.

Initial reports said a gas leak had caused the explosion, but police and hospital officials later said that there was clear evidence of a bomb.

Doctors at a hospital in Saidu Sharif, near the site, said blast victims were being treated for wounds caused by ball bearings, which are sometimes packed into suicide bombs to make them more deadly.

“There was a smell of explosives,” Muhammad Iqbal, a senior doctor, said by telephone.

Islamist violence in Swat drew international condemnation in October after Taliban gunmen shot a teenage schoolgirl and education activist, Malala Yosuafzai. The episode highlighted how Islamist fighters were slowly returning to the valley three years after a Pakistani military operation drove them away.

The violence underscores the fragility of state authority in parts of Pakistan as the country prepares for a general election that is to take place before June. Many Pakistanis worry that increasing instability could cause the elections to be postponed.

Pakistan also is home to many enemies of the U.S. who Washington has frequently targeted with drone attacks. A U.S. missile strike in the northwest tribal region Thursday killed five suspected militants in the seventh such attack in two weeks, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The recent spate of drone strikes has been one of the most intense in the past two years, a period in which political tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan led to a reduced number of attacks compared with 2010, when they were at their most frequent.

It’s unclear whether the current uptick has been caused by particularly valuable intelligence obtained by the CIA, or whether the warming of relations between the two countries has made strikes less sensitive. Protests by the government and Islamic hard-liners have been noticeably muted.

The strike Thursday occurred in a village near Mir Ali, one of the main towns in the North Waziristan tribal area, said Pakistani intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

In other developments, Indian troops fired across the disputed Kashmir border and killed a Pakistani soldier Thursday, Pakistan’s military said, the third deadly episode in the disputed Himalayan region in recent days.

Pakistan said the shooting was unprovoked, while the Indian military said its troops responded to fire from soldiers across the frontier.

The tit-for-tat fighting threatens to reverse recent progress Pakistan and India have made in improving their historically antagonistic relationship. The two countries have fought three major wars since they achieved independence from British India in 1947, two of them over Kashmir, which both claim in its entirety.

Information for this article was contributed by Abdul Sattar, Sebastian Abbot, Rasool Dawar, Shirin Zada, Asif Shahzad, Tim Sullivan and Aijaz Hussain of The Associated Press and by Declan Walsh and Ismail Khan of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/11/2013

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