Pakistan on alert as victims buried

2010-09-04 17:30

Quetta - Anti-terror police were on high alert in Pakistan on Saturday as mass burials took place for the victims of a suicide bomber who killed at least 59 people at a Shi’ite Muslim rally.

The bomber was among a 450-strong crowd marching through the south-western city of Quetta on Friday and blew himself up as the procession reached the main square.

Chaotic scenes followed, with an angry mob starting fires and shooting into the air while others fled or lay on the ground to avoid the gunfire.

"The confirmed death toll in the suicide attack is 59," senior police official Hamid Shakeel told AFP.

An AFP reporter said that 42 victims of suicide bombings were buried, while ceremonies for the rest of the victims were delayed as the families were waiting for the relatives to arrive from other cities.

Families and relatives wept and beat their chests and heads as they carried the coffins to graves.

The city's streets were deserted following a protest strike call by the local traders' associations, an AFP reporter said, with security forces on patrol.

Provincial police chief Malik Mohammad Iqbal said that so far no arrests had been made and an investigation into the incident was in progress.

Nearly 200 people were injured in the attack, police official Sardar Khan said.

In northwest Pakistan, at least one man was killed and four wounded on Friday when a suicide bomber blew himself up after being apprehended by police outside a mosque of the Ahmadi sect in the city of Mardan, police said.

The attacks were the latest in a string of apparent sectarian bloodshed and came just days after three suicide bombers killed 31 people and wounded hundreds more during a Shi’ite mourning procession in Lahore. That attack was subsequently claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.

- SAPA