QUETTA, Pakistan: Thousands of women refused yesterday to bury victims of a bloody bombing and a strike shut down Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi as protesters across the country demanded protection for Shiite Muslims.
Up to 4,000 women began their sit-in in Quetta Sunday evening, a day after a bomb in the city killed 81 members of the minority community including nine women and two girls aged seven and nine.
The women blocked a road and refused to bury the dead until authorities take action against the extremists behind the attack, which wounded 178 people.
The bomb, containing nearly a tonne of explosives hidden in a water tanker, tore through a crowded market in Hazara Town, a Shiite-dominated area on the edge of the city on Saturday evening.
It was the second deadly blast in the city in little over a month.
The sit-in continued yesterday at Hazara Town and near a local station, said Wazir Khan Nasir, police chief of Quetta which is the capital of the southwestern province of Baluchistan.
“We are going to resume negotiations with the Shiite community leaders this morning to convince them to bury the dead,” Nasir told AFP.
However a local Shiite party leader, Qayyum Changezi, said the protesters “will not bury the dead until a targeted operation is launched”.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned the bomb blast and called on authorities to act quickly against those responsible.
Sit-in demonstrations were held in several cities and towns across the country demanding an end to the killing of Shiites.
Public transport drivers and traders stopped work in Karachi yesterday after a Shiite party called a protest strike, residents said.
Schools were closed, traffic was off the roads and attendance in offices was thin in the city. Several political and religious parties have backed the strike call.
“We will continue our peaceful struggle for protection of the Shiite community,” said a Shiite party leader, Hasan Zafar Naqvi.
Baluchistan has increasingly become a flashpoint for surging sectarian bloodshed between Pakistan’s majority Sunni Muslims and Shiites, who account for around a fifth of the country’s 180 million people.
Saturday’s attack takes the death toll in sectarian attacks in Pakistan this year to almost 200 compared with more than 400 in the whole of 2012 — a year which Human Rights Watch described as the deadliest on record for Shiites. — AFP