A suicide attacker on a motorcycle blew himself up in a market in a
Pakistani town close to the Afghan border on Friday, killing 23 Shiite
Muslims and wounding 50 people, officials said.
After the blasts
in Parachinar town in Kurram region, security officials fired on people
who took to the streets to protest, killing three of them, said local
government administrator Wajid Ali.
Violence by Sunni extremists
against Shiites is common in Pakistan, a Muslim country dominated by
Sunnis but home to a sizable Shiite minority. Kurram is the only region
along the Afghan border that has a majority of Shiites, and has seen
bloody outbreaks of sectarian violence in recent years.
Sunni
extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the Taliban often believe Shiites
are infidels and that it is permissible or even praiseworthy to kill
them. The emergence of those groups in the country over the last 10
years has added to the frequency and viciousness of attacks against
Shiites.
Local government administrator Wajid Ali said the bomber struck in a market in the northwestern town of Parachinar.
Many of the 23 dead were shoppers or people with stalls in the market, he said.
A local Taliban commander, Fazal Saeed Haqqani, claimed responsibility for the attack in a call to local journalists.
He justified the attack by saying that Shiites had been attacking Sunnis.
Most
of the victims of sectarian violence in Kurram have been Shiites. For
much of the past five years, Parachinar has been effectively cut of from
the rest of Pakistan because the main road leading out of it passed
through territory controlled by Sunni extremists. People in the town had
to travel by way of Afghanistan and then back into Pakistan to reach
other parts of the country.
Pakistan has seen hundreds of suicide
attacks over the last five years, mostly by militants in the northwest
who have given haven to al-Qaida operatives and insurgents fighting in
Afghanistan. The army has responded with several offensives, but have
had limited success in a country where extremists have significant
support among the population. AP
