Pakistan: Bomb in Lahore Kills 35, Wounds 250 (Cole)

Juan Cole summarises and analyses:

Three explosions hit Shiite processions in the old city of Lahore around 7 pm Wednesday,killing at least 35 persons and wounding about 250. The first explosion appears to have been a pre-set bomb, which went off near to the Karbala Gamay Shiite shrine. Two suicide bombers subsequently struck near Bhati Chowk. The attacks occurred near to the Datta Ganj Bakhsh Sufi shrine, which was bombed last summer.

Although the local police had set up checkpoints and taken basic security measures, the crowd blamed them for having allowed the bombings, and attacked them. They burned police cars and mobbed the nearest police station. Police had to fire in the air to disperse the angry crowds, which they only succeeded in doing around 8:30 pm. The 35,000 Shiites were commemorating the assassination of Imam Ali, who they consider to be the successor of the Prophet Muhammad, in 661. Ali’s shrine is in Najaf, Iraq.

Dawn reports that some in the crowd blamed Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif and his party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), for simply not caring what happened to Shiites. (The Muslim League is not a particularly fundamentalist party, though some of its members have those tendencies, but it has a bias toward conservative Sunnism, and party leader Nawaz Sharif had been in exile for many years in Saudi Arabia, the government and Wahhabi state religion of which is viewed by common Shiites as hostile to them). Lahore Shiites are divided politically, but a lot of ordinary Shiites would be supporters of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party; its de facto leader, President Asaf Ali Zardari, is himself a secular Shiite.

An Urdu newspaper reported that an organization called Lashkar-i Jhangvi al-Alami took responsibility for the bombings, though Lahore police said they had heard nothing about such a claim. The background and recent activities of Lashkar-i Jhangvi is given by the South Asia Terrorism Project....

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