Islamabad, September 18: A suicide bomber has blown up an explosives-laden car at a market in a Shia dominated town in the northwest Pakistan, killing at least 30 people and injuring 70 others.
The deadly incident happened on Friday morning at Hangu road near the city of Kohat, 150 km southwest of Islamabad, a Press TV correspondent reported.
Sources said dozens injured people had been moved to the medial facilities in Ustazai and others nearby towns.
Some local reports put the death toll much higher, saying People were still believed to be trapped inside the buildings which collapsed
in the blast. Several nearby shops were reportedly damaged in the lethal blast.
The death toll is expected to rise as local residents were pulling bodies from debris and several injured were said to be in critical condition.
The incident comes after a string of sectarian attacks on Shia Muslims in recent months undermined the already deteriorating security of the insurgency-hit country.
Countless incidents of massacres took place in Dera Ismail Khan and Kurram Agency over the past few months.
This is while the Taliban-linked Wahhabi groups in Parachinar, Hangu district and much of the Kurram tribal agency have embarked on a series of fatal attacks on Shia Muslims.
Some sources say thousands more Shia community members have been killed in the region over the past few years.
The Pakistani media has warned against religious violence, which has defamed the conflict-torn country.
Some local sources say more than 2,000 Shia community members have been killed in the region since 2007.
The Pakistani media has warned against religious violence which has defamed the conflict-torn country.
“Taliban have gone about slaughtering their fellow-Muslims, especially in targeting the Shias of Kurram and Dera Ismail Khan. Also, it has to be said – and rather unfortunately – that this kind of Talibanization has been happening in the rest of the country…, albeit in a slightly different manner,” The News said in a report in early May.
Shias say they make up one-third of Pakistan’s 160 million-strong population. Since the 1980s, thousands of people have been killed in violence-related incidents in Pakistan by extremist groups.
—–Agencies