Islamabad: At least 37 people were killed in two terrorist attacks in Pakistan last week. In the first attack three heavily-armed suicide bombers stormed the Chinese consulate in Pakistan’s largest city Karachi, killing four people, including two policemen, before the attackers were being shot dead by security forces. The attack was claimed by the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) which said it would not tolerate “any Chinese military expansionist endeavours on Baloch soil.” Three suspected suicide bombers were killed before they were able to enter the facility, Karachi police chief Amir Shaikh said. Nine hand grenades, Kalashnikov assault rifles, magazines and explosives were recovered from the possession of the terrorists.
In the second attack, a suicide bomber on a motorbike rammed through a market place outside a Shia religious seminary, in northwestern Orakzai district near the border with Afghanistan, killing at least 30 people, including members of minority Sikh community. Over 50 people were injured in the terror attack targeted at Shias, the minority sect in the Sunni Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Abbas Khan, a district management official said, “A suicide bomber drove a motorcycle into a busy shopping centre at a weekly festival (Juma Bazar) before detonating his explosives.” Among the dead were three members of the minority Sikh community and two security officials, he added. “The majority of the dead were Shia,” Aminullah, an official of local administration said adding that at least 51 people were injured, 17 of them critically. The injured have been shifted to hospitals. The suicide attack took place outside an imambargah (a religious seminary of Shia Muslims) in Kalaya Bazar a Shia majority area in Lower Orakzai district. Lower Orakzai was one of the tribal agencies before its merger into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province by the previous government.
