Muharram holidays marred by blasts in Pakistan
Suicide bomber kills 30 at Pakistan Ashura parade
A suicide bomber on Monday struck Pakistan's largest procession of Shiite Muslims on the holiest day in their calendar, killing 20 people and wounding dozens more, defying a major security clampdown.
The blast unleashed pandemonium in one of the biggest boulevards in the Pakistani financial capital Karachi, where angry mourners threw stones and opened fire into the air, sparking appeals from the authorities for calm.
Pakistan had deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces, fearing sectarian clashes or militant bombings would target the Shiite faithful who whip themselves to mourn the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein.
"It was a suicide attack. He was walking with the procession and he blew himself up," Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik told private television, appealing on the Shiite community to suspend their commemorations.
Ambulances raced through the streets, ferrying the casualties to hospitals, where state television said medics declared a state of emergency.
In Karachi, the capital of Sindh, more than 50,000 Shiites had poured into the streets to march dressed in black, or beat their naked torsos with chains and slice their skin with knives.
Sectarian violence periodically flares in Pakistan between Shiites, who beat and whip themselves in religious fervour at Ashura, and the country's majority Sunnis, who oppose the public display of grief.
Security has plummeted over the last two and a half years in Pakistan, where militant attacks have killed more than 2,700 people since July 2007 and Washington has put the country on the frontline of its war on Al-Qaeda.
Shiites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167 million. More than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the late 1980s.
Reciting elegies and hymns, participants carried black banners and marched behind replicas of Imam Hussein's tomb in Iraq, whipping their backs to commemorate his killing by armies of the caliph Yazid in 680.
A suicide bomber on Monday struck Pakistan's largest procession of Shiite Muslims on the holiest day in their calendar, killing 20 people and wounding dozens more, defying a major security clampdown.
The blast unleashed pandemonium in one of the biggest boulevards in the Pakistani financial capital Karachi, where angry mourners threw stones and opened fire into the air, sparking appeals from the authorities for calm.
Pakistan had deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces, fearing sectarian clashes or militant bombings would target the Shiite faithful who whip themselves to mourn the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein.
"It was a suicide attack. He was walking with the procession and he blew himself up," Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik told private television, appealing on the Shiite community to suspend their commemorations.
Ambulances raced through the streets, ferrying the casualties to hospitals, where state television said medics declared a state of emergency.
In Karachi, the capital of Sindh, more than 50,000 Shiites had poured into the streets to march dressed in black, or beat their naked torsos with chains and slice their skin with knives.
Sectarian violence periodically flares in Pakistan between Shiites, who beat and whip themselves in religious fervour at Ashura, and the country's majority Sunnis, who oppose the public display of grief.
Security has plummeted over the last two and a half years in Pakistan, where militant attacks have killed more than 2,700 people since July 2007 and Washington has put the country on the frontline of its war on Al-Qaeda.
Shiites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167 million. More than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the late 1980s.
Reciting elegies and hymns, participants carried black banners and marched behind replicas of Imam Hussein's tomb in Iraq, whipping their backs to commemorate his killing by armies of the caliph Yazid in 680.
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