Suicide bomb horror in Pakistan

ASUICIDE bomber in Pakistan killed at least 63 people and wounded dozens more in an attack on mourners gathered at a hospital in Quetta, in the violence-plagued south-western province of Baluchistan.

The bomber struck as more than 100 mourners, mostly lawyers and journalists, crowded into the emergency department to accompany the body of a prominent lawyer who had been shot and killed in the city earlier in the day.

Abdul Rehman Miankhel, a senior official at the government-run Civil Hospital, where the explosion occurred, said at least 63 people had been killed and more than 50 had been injured as the casualty toll spiked from initial estimates.

“There are many wounded, so the death toll could rise,” said Rehmat Saleh Baloch, the provincial health minister.

Television footage showed scenes of chaos, with panicked people fleeing through debris as smoke filled the hospital corridors.

The motive behind the attack was unclear and no group had yet claimed responsibility, but several lawyers have been targeted during a recent spate of killings in Quetta.

The latest victim, Bilal Anwar Kasi, was shot and killed while on his way to the city’s main court complex, senior police official Nadeem Shah said.

He was president of the Baluchistan Bar Association.

The subsequent suicide attack appeared to target his mourners, Anwar ul Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Baluchistan government, said.

“It seems it was a attack,” he said.

Police cordoned off the hospital after the blast.

Aside from a long-running separatist insurgency, and sectarian tension, Baluchistan preplanned also suffers from rising crime.

In January a suicide bomber killed 15 people outside a polio eradication centre in an attack claimed by both the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, another Islamist militant group that has pledged allegiance to theIslamic State in the Middle East.

Quetta has also long been regarded as a base for the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership has regularly held meetings there in the past.

In May, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed by a US drone strike while travelling to Quetta from the Pakistan-Iran border. – Reuters

PICTURE: AP Pakistani lawyers mourn the deaths of their colleagues following a bomb blast. A powerful bomb went off inside a government-run hospital in the south-western city of Quetta yesterday, killing dozens of people and wounding dozens of others.