Bombings kill 115 in Pakistan

QUETTA, Pakistan -- A series of bombings killed 115 people in Pakistan yesterday, including 81 who died in a sectarian attack on a billiard hall in the southwest city of Quetta, officials said.
The blasts punctuated one of the deadliest days in recent years in Pakistan, where the government faces a bloody insurgency by Taliban militants in the northwest and Baluch militants in the southwest.

The billiard hall in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, was hit by twin blasts about 5 minutes apart last night. The hall was in an area dominated by Shia Muslims, a religious minority, and most of the 81 dead and more than 120 wounded were of the sect, police said.
Many of the people who rushed to the scene after the first blast, including police officers, rescue workers and journalists, were hit by the second bomb, which caused the roof to collapse, police said.
The sectarian militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the attack. A spokesmen, Bakar Saddiq, said the first blast was carried out by a suicide bomber and the second was a bomb planted in a car and detonated remotely.
Radical Sunni groups often target the Shia minority, who they believe hold heretical views and are not true Muslims.
Earlier in the day, a bomb targeting paramilitary soldiers in a commercial area in Quetta killed 12 people and wounded 40 others, police said. The United Baluch Army, a separatist group, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Elsewhere in Pakistan, a bomb in a crowded Sunni mosque in the northwest city of Mingora killed 22 people and wounded more than 70, police said.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

Car bombing leaves at least 19 dead, 25 injured in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – At least 19 people were killed by a car bomb in Pakistan on Sunday, the latest in a pattern of escalating attacks by militants in recent weeks.
An explosives-laden car was detonated next to a convoy of three buses carrying Shiite Muslim pilgrims from Pakistan’s western Baluchistan province to Iran. The blast also injured 25 people.

Officials said the attack apparently involved a remote-controlled bomb planted in a Toyota Corolla parked along the road that exploded just after a lead security vehicle that was guarding the convoy passed by. As soon as the first bus pulled alongside the car, the bomb detonated, all but destroying the vehicle.
The pilgrims had boarded in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, and were headed to Taftan, a border town in Iran. Shiites have often been the target of sectarian attacks by Sunni Muslim groups along this road, a main thoroughfare for pilgrims visiting religious sites in Iran.
“One security vehicle was leading the convoy while another one was behind it,” said Tufail Baloch, chief administrator in Mastung, where the attack took place. “The other two buses were partially damaged.”
Images on Pakistan’s Geo TV network showed the lead bus reduced to a charred, nearly unidentifiable jumble of metal, with the second and third badly damaged buses surrounded by ambulances tending to the injured.
Attacks on Shiites are on the rise in Pakistan, with more than 320 killed this year, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch. The group says the Pakistani government appears largely indifferent to the killings, given its failure to catch or prosecute those carrying out the attacks.