Shia leaders call for army intervention after Quetta blasts

By Reuters

Published: January 11, 2013

Mourners sit beside the coffins of blast victims at a mosque following overnight twin suicide bombings in Quetta. PHOTO: AFP

QUETTA: Shia leaders called on the military on Friday to seize control of the provincial capital of Quetta to protect the Muslim minority after one of the worst sectarian attacks in the country’s history.

Shia leaders also told Reuters they would not allow the 82 victims of two bomb attacks in Quetta on Thursday to be buried until their demands were met.

A string of bombings left at least 93 people dead and over 150 wounded in one of the bloodiest days of violence that Balochistan has seen for years.


A suicide bomber detonated the explosives inside a crowded snooker club on Alamdar Road, a Shia-dominated neighbourhood of Quetta.

As soon as mediapersons, police and rescue officials reached the site, the second blast went off. Television channels counted the two explosions as suicide attacks. Most of the casualties were caused by the second blast.

The bombings disrupted power supplies and plunged the Alamdar Road neighbourhood into darkness. The area is dominated by the Hazara community, who are Shias by sect. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the blast and said their target was the Hazara community.

Express Tribune

Quetta Bombing Underscores Pakistan Chaos

By Tom Wright

Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesLocal residents at the site of overnight twin suicide bombings in Quetta, Jan. 11.

The killing of 81 people in a Shiite area of Quetta on Thursday is the latest sign that a war by Sunni militants on minority sects in Pakistan is spiraling out of control.

The twin blasts on a Quetta billiard hall are part of a systematic attempt by Sunni extremists to wipe out the Hazaras, a Shiite ethnic group that emigrated to Pakistan from Afghanistan three generations ago.

Sunni gunmen with links to the Taliban for over a year have been targeting members of the Persian-speaking Hazara community, often in broad daylight, on the streets of Quetta, a lawless city in Pakistan’s southwest near the frontier with Afghanistan.

But the violence against Shiites hasn’t been restricted to Quetta and the restive southwestern province of Baluchistan, of which it is the capital. Shiites have increasingly been gunned down in Karachi, the southern financial capital. In August, militants wearing Pakistan army uniforms boarded a bus travelling into Pakistan’s Himalayas and shot dead over 20 Shiite passengers after checking their identity cards.

Human Rights Watch estimates around 400 Shiites were killed in Pakistan last year, an escalation of violence that highlights the failure of Pakistan’s security forces to bring extremist groups under control despite international pressure on Pakistan to rein them in.

A look at Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned Sunni sectarian organization that claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack, shows why the state is failing to stem the violence...Continue Reading.... 

NY Times; Mourning Online for Pakistani Rights Activist Killed in Quetta Bombing

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 kill 92 in Pakistan's Quetta

Sunni extremist group claims Quetta bombing

More Than 100 People Killed in Bombings Across Pakistan

96 killed in Quetta bomb blasts

Muhammad Ejaz Khan
Friday, January 11, 2013
From Print Edition



QUETTA: Thursday, January 10, turned out to be a horrific day for the people of Quetta when the city was rocked by three bombings that killed at least 96 people and injured over 200. The dead included security officials, Edhi volunteers, a TV reporter and a cameraman. The last bombing of the day was the most powerful ever to hit the city.

The first explosion took place at the Bacha Khan Chowk in the afternoon while the other two occured on the crowded Alamdar Road at night.

The deadly twin blasts that rocked Alamdar Road left at least 80 people dead, including a deputy superintendent of police, an SHO, Edhi volunteers, a reporter and cameraman of Samaa TV, while 200 others were injured.

Police said the first blast took place outside a snooker club at the Rehmatullah Chowk, an area inhabited by the Hazara Shia community, at about 8:50pm, which left some 10 people injured. The more powerful second blast took place on the same spot after 20 minutes when a lot of passers-by, media men and police officials had assembled to evacuate the injured of the first blast.

This resulted in the death of as many as 70 people on the spot, most of them from the Hazrara Shia community. DSP Mujahid Hussain, SHO Zafar Ali, Samaa cameraman Imran Sheikh, a reporter of the same channel, Saifur Rehman, and four Edhi volunteers were among those killed. A Geo cameraman Acme Roger received injuries on the face.

All the injured, some of them in a precarious condition, were rushed to different hospitals in the city, where an emergency had been declared. The blasts caused suspension of electricity supply to the area.

“It was the largest ever bomb to have hit the city,” said a senior police official. Police experts said that more than 100 kg of explosives were used in the bomb, a record for troubled Quetta city.

Earlier, the first bomb of the day exploded at a busy shopping area, the Bacha Khan Chowk, killing at least 12 people and wounding 40 others. Hospital sources feared that the death toll might rise, as many injured people were in a critical condition. One Jawan of the Frontier Corps (FC) was among the 12 people who were killed in the blast.

The bomb was planted under a white-coloured car and went off with a big bang at around 3:50pm. “Initial investigations suggest that the blast was caused by a remote controlled bomb, which was planted under a vehicle,” CCPO Quetta Mir Zubair said while talking to newsmen on the spot. The thud of the explosion could be heard several kilometres away. Apparently, the blast targeted a security forces’ vehicle, sources added.

More than 12 vehicles and four motorcycles were badly damaged in the blast. The windowpanes of nearby buildings were smashed. The victims were shifted to the Civil Hospital and CMH.

The police and law enforcement agencies cordoned off the area. “It was a high-powered time device weighing 20 to 25 kilograms and was planted under a car near the Baldia Plaza at Bacha Khan Chowk”, said officials of the bomb disposal squad. The blast created a nine-foot-long and four-foot-deep crater.

Meanwhile, President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, Balochistan governor Nawab Zulfiqar Ali Magsi, Chief Minister Nawab Aslam Raisani, PML-N leaders Nawaz Sharif, Shahbaz Sharif, MQM chief Altaf Hussain, PTI Chairman Imran Khan and others strongly condemned the blasts. They expressed deep concern over the deaths of the people.

The News