Friday, January 11, 2013
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
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....
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 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...
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