DERA GHAZI KHAN – The death toll rose to 50 Monday after two suicide bombers unleashed carnage at a Sufi shrine Dera Ghazi Khan where hundreds had gathered for a religious ceremony, an official said.
The bombers on Sunday struck the shrine of 13th century Sufi saint Ahmed Sultan, popularly known as Sakhi Sarwar, in Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab province.
It was the deadliest suicide attack in Pakistan since a mosque bombing killed 68 people on November 5 in the northwest area of Darra Adam Khel.
“We had 44 dead in our hospital. Six people died on the spot and their families took their bodies directly,” said Tariq Mehmood, an emergency ward official at Civil Hospital in Dera Ghazi Khan. Local police officer Zahid Hussain Shah gave a marginally lower death toll of 49, which officials late Sunday had put at 41.
“Most of the bodies have been identified and sent to their home towns for burial,” Shah told AFP. Militants have increasingly targeted Sufi worshippers, who follow a mystical strain of Islam, in Pakistan. Dera Ghazi Khan is close to the tribal area which is known as a hub of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants. The rugged tribal region is described by Washington as the most dangerous place on Earth and an Al-Qaeda headquarters.
More than 4,200 people have been killed across Pakistan in attacks blamed on homegrown Taliban and other Islamist extremist networks since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in July 2007. Local police officer Shah said funeral prayers for seven of Sunday’s victims would be held at the Sakhi Sarwar shrine, but that the majority of those killed were pilgrims from elsewhere in Punjab and neighbouring province Sindh.
About 70 people were still being treated for injuries in hospital, he added. Police and security agencies are questioning a suspected accomplice arrested with a suicide jacket near the shrine and whom police said was injured when a grenade exploded in his hand.
“The bomb disposal squad removed his suicide jacket which he could not detonate,” Shah said. The suspect was identified as an Afghan refugee in his mid-teens from the militant fortress of North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s northwest tribal belt. Washington considers the area a haven for Al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives who fled the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan to regroup and launch attacks on foreign troops across the border.
US officials would like Pakistan to launch a major offensive in North Waziristan, considered the ultimate fortress of groups fighting US-led troops in Afghanistan, but Pakistan says its troops are too overstretched elsewhere.
