By ROBERT MACKEY
Ghalib Khalil, via TumblrIrfan Ali, a Pakistani activist who was killed on Thursday in a bombing, addressed a rally against sectarian attacks in September in Islamabad.
Bombs in two Pakistani cities killed at least 115 people on Thursday, with the worst carnage inflicted by two explosions a few minutes apart in the southwestern city of Quetta, taking the lives of at least 81 people. As my colleague Declan Walsh reports from Islamabad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group with strong ties to the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack in a Quetta neighborhood dominated by ethnic Hazara Shiites.
The group maximized the deadliness of the bloody attack by sending a suicide bomber to detonate his explosives inside a snooker hall, and then a second attacker blew up his vehicle outside the club a short time later, killing rescue workers and journalists.
Among those killed by the second blast was a rights activist, Irfan Ali, 33, who was helping the injured. Just before his death, he noted on his @khudialiTwitter feed that he had narrowly escaped the fist blast. Then he postedanother message, registering his dismay that the group behind the attack had also succeeded in driving some Hazara families out of their homes. The families who moved out, he wrote in his final words on Twitter, had “finally succumbed to the genocidal pressure,” from the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. It was, he noted, a “sad day for diversity in Baluchistan,” the northwestern province that has Quetta as its capital....Continue Reading...
Bombs in two Pakistani cities killed at least 115 people on Thursday, with the worst carnage inflicted by two explosions a few minutes apart in the southwestern city of Quetta, taking the lives of at least 81 people. As my colleague Declan Walsh reports from Islamabad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group with strong ties to the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack in a Quetta neighborhood dominated by ethnic Hazara Shiites.
The group maximized the deadliness of the bloody attack by sending a suicide bomber to detonate his explosives inside a snooker hall, and then a second attacker blew up his vehicle outside the club a short time later, killing rescue workers and journalists.
Among those killed by the second blast was a rights activist, Irfan Ali, 33, who was helping the injured. Just before his death, he noted on his @khudialiTwitter feed that he had narrowly escaped the fist blast. Then he postedanother message, registering his dismay that the group behind the attack had also succeeded in driving some Hazara families out of their homes. The families who moved out, he wrote in his final words on Twitter, had “finally succumbed to the genocidal pressure,” from the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. It was, he noted, a “sad day for diversity in Baluchistan,” the northwestern province that has Quetta as its capital....Continue Reading...
