PAKISTAN: A suicide bomber detonated a powerful device in a crowded Shia mosque in the business district of the Pakistani city of Karachi yesterday, killing at least 15 people and wounding more than 125, police said.
The mosque was packed for Friday afternoon prayers when it was shattered by the fourth and worst bomb attack in five days in Pakistan, a frontline state in the US-led war on terror.
President Pervez Musharraf called the attack a "heinous act of terrorism" and ordered an immediate inquiry.
The mosque was badly damaged. Blood stained the floor and walls, and pieces of flesh were scattered around.
It was just the latest attack on a Shia mosque in Pakistan, which has been racked for decades by violence between the minority Islamic sect and militants in the Sunni majority.
Angry Shias went on a rampage in central Karachi, pelting cars and shops with stones and setting fire to a state-run petrol station, several vehicles, a building and a police post near the mausoleum of Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
"It appears to be a suicide attack," said a provincial security adviser, Mr Aftab Sheikh. "The explosives were attached to the body of the bomber who was apparently in the third row of worshippers."
Mr Ali Abbas, his clothes smeared with blood, said he was in the third row when the bomb exploded and something hit him hard on the back.
"It was part of a body." he said. "There was chaos. All of us ran outside, jumping over the injured and human remains."
The Prime Minister, Mr Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, vowed strict punishment of the perpetrators.
"Those who committed this cold-blooded murder cannot be termed Muslims as Islam shuns violence," the official APP news agency quoted him as saying.
"We are at the mercy of terrorists who are getting bolder because they are not being punished," said Shia cleric Hasan Turabi. "Now we have to defend ourselves."
More than 125 people have died in sectarian violence in Pakistan in less than a year, most of them Shias.
In March, 44 people were killed and 150 wounded in an attack on a Shia mosque in the south-western city of Quetta that was blamed on Sunni militants.
Earlier on Friday, three people were wounded in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province, when a small bomb exploded opposite a hotel due to host a weekend investment conference.
Police said the blast was caused by a small time-bomb attached to a bicycle. Baluchistan's Chief Minister, Jam Mir Mohammad Yusuf, called it an attempt to sabotage the meeting.
Baluchistan is one of Pakistan's poorest regions and has been frequently troubled by Islamic militancy and tribal violence.