Pakistan mourns 61 killed in Shikarpur imambargah bombing

DG ISPR Maj Gen Asim Bajwa says some critically injured patients shifted to CMH Pano Aqil

SHIKARPUR: Thousands of Shias rallied Saturday to protest the killing of 61 people in a suicide bombing at a mosque, as Pakistan shut down to mourn the nation's worst sectarian attack in nearly two years.

The blast hit the mosque in the Shikarpur district as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers.

Police on Saturday said the devastating explosion was a suicide attack and the bomber detonated the explosives strapped to his body "in the middle of the mosque".

"The bomber selected a place in the mosque that would cause huge destruction," Raja Umar Khitab, a police official in Sindh's counter-terror department, told AFP on Saturday.

Khitab said the bomb was loaded with steel pellets, ball bearings and other shrapnel to cause maximum damage.

The provincial government announced Saturday as a day of mourning, closing schools, shops and offices, with no public transport available on the roads.

In Shikarpur, thousands gathered to attend funeral prayers for the dead.

Local television broadcast footage of thousands of people, mostly Shia Muslims, carrying black flags and beating their chests as they offered their prayers one after another.

Karachi also shut down for the day, with hundreds of Shias staging protest rallies.

Police said unidentified "miscreants" early Saturday set fire to a passenger bus and a truck in the city, but no one was hurt.

Friday's bombing was the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since March 2013, when a car bomb in a Shia neighbourhood of Karachi killed 45.

A spokesperson for the shadowy Jundullah militant group, a splinter faction of the Pakistani Taliban, said they were behind the latest blast.

Around 1,000 Shias have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, with many of the attacks claimed by the hardline Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

Later that evening ISPR Director-General Maj-Gen Asim Bajwa tweeted that some critically injured patients had been shifted to CMH Pano Aqil.

Update Shikarpur blast:Critically injured shifted to CMH Pano Aqil,15 serious cases shifted to Kci by C130.Such condemnable barbaric acts1/2

— Gen(R) Asim Saleem Bajwa (@AsimBajwaISPR) January 31, 2015

...will never succeed in fracturing our national consensus in rooting out terrorism,sectarianism,extremism.Our collective resolve grows-2/2

— Gen(R) Asim Saleem Bajwa (@AsimBajwaISPR) January 31, 2015