Quetta: At least 24 Shiite faithful — including 10 women — were killed in a gun and suicide attack on the restive Pakistan-Iran border, officials said Monday, the latest assault on the beleaguered minority sect
The attack late Sunday night came when a bus carrying Pakistanis returning from a visit to holy sites in Iran stopped at a restaurant in the Pakistani town of Taftan in troubled Balochistan province.
“In total 24 Shiites including 10 women were killed in the attack. There are 13 others including eight women and five men who were wounded,” Akbar Durrani, a province official, told AFP.
“Four suicide bombers attacked the restaurants in Taftan,” which is around 700 kilometres (430 miles) southwest of the provincial capital Quetta, he added.
Authorities airlifted the bodies to the northwestern city of Kohat where most of the victims were from, Durrani said.
No group has yet come forward to claim the attack.
Two devastating bombings in Quetta killed nearly 200 people last year and were claimed by banned Sunni extremist organisation Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), which has links to Al Qaida.
Nearly 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, a heavy toll on the community that makes up roughly 20 percent of the country’s population of 180 million, which is predominantly Muslim.
In a separate incident Monday, two paramilitary soldiers were killed and three others were injured in an IED blast in Mashkay town in Awaran district of Balochistan.
Resource-rich Balochistan is home to a long-running separatist conflict that was revived in 2004, with nationalists seeking to stop what they see as the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and alleged rights abuses.
Attacks by separatist insurgents on security forces are also common.
