PAKISTAN: A bomb killed at least 15 people at evening prayers in a Shia mosque yesterday in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, where a senior cleric from the majority Sunni sect was shot dead on Sunday.
Doctors said they had counted 15 dead and at least 55 wounded, a dozen critically, while wailing men and women searched in the darkness for relatives believed buried in rubble under the cracked dome of the city centre mosque.
An angry crowd outside the mosque compound set fire to vehicles and prevented police from approaching the scene, letting through only ambulances.
Karachi had feared fresh inter-Muslim sectarian violence after the killing on Sunday of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a radical Sunni preacher, and thousands of police were on duty at the city's mosques in anticipation of a backlash.
A suicide bomber killed 24 people and wounded 125 in an attack on another Shia mosque in Karachi on May 7th, but police were unsure whether this too was a suicide bomb attack.
Dr Ishratul Ibad, the governor of Sindh province, appealed for calm, telling Geo Television: "This is a planned act and those behind it are very organised." Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told the same news channel that President Pervez Musharraf planned to take serious action to restore order in the city.
While the latest bombing smacked of domestic sectarianism, ingrained hatred for the US surfaced along with grief and anger among the crowd and many chanted "Down with America".