Many dead in Pakistan mosque blast

An explosion ripped through a Shiite Muslim mosque in an eastern Pakistani city during Friday prayers, killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens of others.

Nisar Ahmed, police chief in Sialkot, said that more than 100 people were inside the mosque at the time of the blast, and according to his initial estimates, at least 10 people had died.

“Dozens of people have been taken to hospital in critical condition, and I think the casualties and death toll will rise,” he said.

Another official at the police control room in Sialkot, however, said that more than 500 people had been inside the mosque.

An angry mob went on the rampage after the blast, and had started pelting police with bricks and stones and wrecking property, police said.

Mosques of Pakistan’s Shiite minority have often been targeted in sectarian violence with majority Sunni Muslims. Most of Pakistan’s 150 million Muslims live in harmony, but there are radical elements on both sides of the sectarian divide.

The attack comes less than a week after Pakistan arrested a top al-Qaida suspect, Amjad Hussain Farooqi, believed to be behind the kidnapping and beheading in 2002 of American reporter Daniel Pearl, and two failed assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf that left 17 other people dead in December 2003.