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May 29, 2010
Mosque attacks: 80 dead
<!--background story, collapse if none--> Violence in Pakistan
* Taleban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants have orchestrated a three-year bombing campaign in Pakistan to avenge military operations and the government's alliance with the United States in neighbouring Afghanistan.
* Friday's attacks were the worst in Pakistan since a suicide bomber killed 101 people on January 1 at a volleyball game in Bannu, which abuts the tribal belt along the Afghan border.
* Nine attacks have killed around 265 people in Lahore since March 2009.
* Police said there were at least three attackers in Model Town. 'They came into the mosque from the back and started firing. They were armed with hand grenades and suicide vests and other weapons,' Rana Ayaz, a senior local police official, told AFP.
* Officials said one of the attackers blew himself up and two were arrested - one of them a teenager. The other was seriously wounded.
* Religious violence in Pakistan, mostly between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shiites, has killed more than 4,000 people in the past decade.
* In the south-western city of Quetta, where targeted killings blamed on insurgents and Taleban militants have recently increased, gunmen shot dead four policemen and then fled on the back of a motorcycle on Friday. -- AFP
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'Terrorists have attacked mosques. They are firing and using grenades. They have taken people inside the mosque hostage,' district civil defence official Muzha Ahmed told AFP by telephone from the scene in Garhi Shahu. -- PHOTO: AFP
LAHORE (Pakistan) - GUNMEN wearing suicide vests stormed two Pakistani mosques belonging to a minority sect in Lahore, bringing carnage to Friday prayers and killing around 80 people. Squads of militants burst into prayer halls firing guns, throwing grenades and taking hostages in the deadliest attack on the city of eight million, which has been increasingly hit by Taleban and Al-Qaeda-linked violence.
Both mosques belonged to the Ahmadi community, which Pakistan has declared non-Muslim. Although the estimated minority of two million has been attacked by Sunni extremists before, the magnitude of Friday's assault was unprecedented. The United States condemned what it called 'brutal violence against innocent people'. 'We also condemn the targeting and violence against any religious group, in this case the Ahmadi community,' State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters in Washington.
EU diplomatic chief Catherine Ashton said she was 'appalled'. Pakistan's leading rights group said the community had received threats for more than a year and officials blamed the attack on Islamist militants, who have killed more than 3,370 people in bombings over the last three years. 'Terrorists have attacked mosques. They are firing and using grenades. They have taken people inside the mosque hostage,' district civil defence official Muzhar Ahmed told AFP from the scene in the bustling Garhi Shahu neighbourhood.
The attacks sparked more than two hours of gun battles with police and commandos, as bursts of heavy gunfire rocked the neighbourhoods and rescue services raced through the streets to tend to the victims. -- AFP
