Deadly double bombing targets Shiite Muslims in Karachi

AFP - Twin bombings in Pakistan's financial capital Karachi on Friday that killed at least 22 people were carried out by suicide bombers on motorcycles, a bomb disposal official said.
  
"Both of the blasts are of the same nature. Both were suicide and both were on motorcycles," the official, Munir Ahmad Sheikh, told private television channel Geo from Karachi.
  
"In the first attack, the bomber hit the bus. In the second attack, the bomber sitting on a motorcycle exploded himself," he added.
   
Women and children were among those killed and wounded when the blast occurred on the last day of the holy Muslim month of Muharram, gutting the bus and flinging shards of glass across one of Karachi's busiest roads.
   
Witnesses and officials said the bus was packed with Shiite Muslims heading to a religious procession to mark the last day of Muharram in Karachi, a city of 16 million people with a sprawling port on the Arabian sea.
   
"I saw a man riding a motorcycle. He hit the bus on the wrong side of the road, on the left, and then there was a huge explosion," said Jaafar Ali, a mechanic in his mid-20s, who had been travelling in another vehicle.
   
"Some of my friends were sitting in that bus. I'm going to the hospital. I don't know whether they are dead or survived," he told AFP in tears.
   
Nails, of the type often packed in bombs, pierced the walls and doors of a bungalow on the side of the road. Blood stained the inside of the bus and shoes lying nearby on the road, said an AFP reporter.
   
"We have counted 12 dead bodies and more than 50 injured. There are children and women among the killed and wounded," Doctor Seemi Jamali, chief of Jinnah Hospital in Karachi, told AFP.
   
"Twelve of the injured are in a critical condition. The injured told me a man riding a motorcycle hit the bus and then the explosion came," she added.
   
"A bomb was planted on the motorcyle and it hit the bus," city police chief Waseem Ahmad told reporters, declining to confirm witness statements that implied the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.
   
"We cannot determine in one and a half hours whether it was a suicide blast or not. We are examining the site. We are collecting the evidence. We are taking witness statements and then we will say something concrete," he said.
   
The attack happened in a smart residential area on the main Faisal highway that intersects the city. Volunteers helped evacuate the wounded as ambulances raced past armed security forces patrolling the area.
   
On December 28, a bombing killed 43 people and reduced to a bloodbath a parade marking the holiest Shiite day of Ashura earlier in Muharram.
   
Pakistan's feared Taliban network claimed responsibility for that attack, sparking riots that caused huge financial losses.
   
Sectarian violence periodically flares in Pakistan between Shiites, who beat and whip themselves in religious fervour during Ashura, and the country's majority Sunnis, who oppose the public display of grief.
   
Shiites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167 million. More than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the late 1980s.
   
Pakistan has seen a recent decline in militant attacks, attributed both to the success of a US drone war and Pakistani offensives in the tribal belt by the Afghan border where Taliban and Al-Qaeda networks are based.
   
Last month, 153 people were killed by militants in Pakistan -- nearly half the 275 killed in October, according to an AFP tally.
   
But security forces have been on alert in Karachi with a wave of political violence killing at least 37 activists from rival parties in the local governing coalition in the last five days, following 48 similar killings last month.