Bomber Kills 25 Worshipers in Pakistan

A suicide attacker set off a bomb in a Shiite Muslim mosque packed with hundreds of worshipers for Friday prayers, killing at least 25 and wounding more than 100, witnesses and hospital workers said.

Witnesses said they saw a man carry a briefcase into the Zainabia mosque in the Pakistani city of Sialkot shortly before the explosion. The blast left a crater inside the mosque, severely damaged the walls and shattered windows. Experts who later examined the remnants of the briefcase said they believed it had contained the explosives.

Soon after the blast, a bomb disposal squad defused a second explosive device in the city.

The explosion drew a crowd into the streets and triggered rioting. Angry residents set fire to eight vehicles and initially stopped police officers from entering the mosque, pelting them with bricks and stones, wrecking property and shouting anti-government slogans.

The local government called in army troops, who helped the police force restore order to Sialkot, about 125 miles southeast of the capital, Islamabad.

No group immediately took responsibility for the attack.

In recent years, Pakistan has been racked by violence between militant groups drawn from the Shiite community, which comprises about 20% of the country’s 150 million people, and the majority Sunni Muslims.

In addition, some Sunni groups linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, angered by President Pervez Musharraf’s support of the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, have attacked Western interests and government sites.

Musharraf, a key U.S. ally, said the bombing showed that “terrorists have no religion and are enemies of mankind,” according to Associated Press. He renewed his government’s commitment to root them out.

The attack occurred five days after Pakistani paramilitary police officers killed one of the country’s most wanted Sunni militants, Amjad Hussain Farooqi, in a four-hour shootout in the south of the country.

Farooqi was suspected of being the mastermind of several attempts to kill Musharraf last year and was linked to an Islamic militant group blamed for the 2002 slaying of American journalist Daniel Pearl.

In July, Shaukat Aziz, then Pakistan’s prime-minister designate, also survived an assassination attempt.

Security officials said in mid-August that they had foiled an effort to disrupt Pakistan’s Independence Day celebrations, seizing rockets and missiles and arresting suspected terrorists. Several homemade bombs exploded in the city of Quetta that day but caused no injuries.

Witnesses to Friday’s attack described a scene of blood and chaos in the aftermath of the blast.

“I was praying when I first saw a bright light and then something exploded with a big bang, and I fell down,” Sajjad Anwar told AP while being treated at a hospital. “I saw human body pieces hitting the walls and ceiling of the mosque.”

“The city has never experienced a worse incident,” another resident, Ghulam Abbas, said in a telephone interview.

It was the third major attack on a Shiite mosque in Pakistan in recent months.

In May, two bombings over a three-week period killed more than 30 people, injured more than 100 and provoked a wave of sectarian unrest in Karachi.

The volatile port city also witnessed a pair of car bombings in May near the U.S. consul’s residence.

In the weeks between those bombings, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a leading Sunni cleric and supporter of Osama bin Laden, was shot to death in Karachi by unidentified gunmen. His killing also led to rioting.

Two bombs also exploded in early August near a Sunni Muslim school in western Karachi, killing eight people and injuring 42.