Militants kill 40 in Pakistan bomb blast

A FRESH explosion of sectarian violence in Pakistan in which 40 people were killed is a fight-back by hardcore Islamic militants, many trained of which are by al-Qaida, investigators and analysts have said.

"It's difficult to say what will follow now but things are going from bad to worse," said Farooq Awan, senior police investigator in the southern city of Karachi, which has been riven by sectarian violence since the 1980s.

Fanatics among Shiites, a 20% minority in Pakistan where more than 95% of the 150 million people are Muslims, and Sunnis are locked in a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge attacks just a week before the start of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

A massive car bomb before dawn yesterday at a prayer gathering of an outlawed Sunni extremist group in Multan killed 40 people in the second slaughter of Muslim worshippers in under a week.

It brings to six the number of sectarian massacres this year and the death toll to 164. Last Friday 30 Shiite worshippers were killed as they prayed in the eastern city of Sialkot.

Police saw a chain of revenge originating in the high-profile killing by paramilitaries last month of top Sunni militant Amjad Farooqi. He was considered al-Qaida's key recruiter and operator in Pakistan and the mastermind of two attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf.

"The Sialkot blast was a reaction to Amjad Farooqi's killing, and the Multan blast could be the reaction to the killing of Shiites in Sialkot," Awan said.

"The most alarming part of these sectarian-related incidents is that they have once again fuelled tensions ahead of Ramadan."

The upswing in violence comes as Pakistani security forces make headway in nabbing militant chiefs like Farooqi.

Farooqi worked closely with al-Qaida leaders.

Many of his Sunni supporters were trained by al-Qaida during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan and in al-Qaida camps in western Pakistan along the Afghan border as recently as this year.

The new extremist outfit Jund Allah was trained near the frontier before trying to assassinate Karachi's army commander in June, investigators have said. Many of its leaders have been arrested.

Investigators have noted an increasingly clear nexus between al-Qaida and home-grown Pakistani militants, estimated to be in the tens of thousands.

They say the links could explain the resumption of sectarian attacks, which had subsided after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001.

Some religious leaders alleged there was a bid to divide the two communities to destabilise Musharraf. He is despised by al-Qaida and Pakistan's vast network of Islamic militants for abandoning Pakistan's support for the Taliban and for cracking down on religious extremists.

Analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi saw the latest upsurge as an attempt to distract government efforts to dismantle militant groups.

"They are using the violence to deter the government and to create a space for dialogue," Rizvi, former head of political science at Punjab University in Lahore, said.

"They are doing this to show they are powerful enough to disrupt governance and undermine the government's credibility."

Human Rights Commission director I.A. Rehman saw the 10,000-plus Koranic schools throughout Pakistan as a source of bitter sectarian hatred.

"The sectarian violence is the result of years of brainwashing of thousands and thousand of young minds in madrassas," Rehman added.

"This is the only job they know they can perform well."