Police said they defused a bomb left in a makeshift mosque inside a hospital compound in the country’s biggest city of Karachi, fearing it could have detonated during Friday prayers.
The police found a bag in a tented mosque in the residential colony of Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) with the live bomb inside. The JPMC is Karachi’s biggest government-run hospital in the city.
“Some witnesses informed the police about a suspicious looking bag, which some unknown men had abandoned in the mosque,” Iqbal Mehmood, a senior police official, told reporters.
The AFP says another police official said on condition of anonymity that it was a remote-controlled bomb and that police feared it could have been detonated during the main weekly Muslim prayers in the afternoon.
Mehmood said the home-made explosive device weighed at least 15 kilogrammes (33 pounds).
It is further said that the bomb was similar to those used to target the navy buses in the terror strikes and it could have caused destruction within a radius of 500 meters.
