42 killed in Pakistan shrine blasts
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ected terrorists on the spot including one wearing suicide jacket. The suicide bomber arrested by the police is said to be from the northwestern part of the country.
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A rescue worker examines the blast site in Deraghazi Khan, Pakistan, April 3, 2011. (Xinhua) |
Local media reports quoted police sources as saying that the suicide bomber in the first blast, who killed himself right on the spot, is aged between 17 to 22.
As the shrine, which is called Sakhi Sarvar, is located atop a mountain, rescue workers had to fight the difficulty terrains in shifting the injured people down from the mountain.
It took about two or three hours to get the injured people down from the mountain to the nearest hospital which is located some 40 kilometers away, said a rescue officer, adding that many critically injured people died before they reached the hospital.
Shortly after the blasts were reported, the Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani issued a statement strongly condemning the terrorist attack at innocent civilians and ordered an immediate investigation into the case.
Latest news coming in said that TTP (Pakistan Taliban) has claimed the responsibility for the serial blast attacks at the Sakhi Sarvar shrine.
Sunday's terrorist attack at a shrine is the first of its kind reported in the country since this year. Last year several suicide blast attacks at shrines were reported in different parts of the country. One attack at a shrine in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore on July 1 is the most serious, leaving 37 people dead and over 170 others injured. The Lahore shrine attack was later followed by one in Karachi and another in Pak Pattan, a city in eastern part of Pakistan.
As the militants in Pakistan are facing the ever-mounting pressure from the strikes launched by the Pakistani security forces in the country's northwestern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, they have changed their strategy by avoiding direct conflict with the armed forces and shifting to attack at the so- called "soft targets" such as civilians, government office buildings and infrastructure in a bid to force the government to stop the strikes against them.
