43 die in Pakistan sectarian attack
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least 43 people were killed and 13 wounded Wednesday when armed men opened fire on a bus carrying members of the Ismaili community, a sub-sect of Shiite Islam, in Karachi.
Provincial police chief Ghulam Haider Jamali said 60 people were on board the bus in Pakistan’s largest city when six gunmen riding motorcycles stopped the vehicle, got aboard and opened fire with 9-millimeter pistols.
Sixteen women were among the dead, Jamali said.
The passengers were reportedly traveling to a house of worship in a bus that belonged to an Ismaili welfare society.
It was the deadliest attack in recent memory against Pakistan’s Ismailis, widely regarded as a progressive and largely apolitical community whose members are prominent in the health and education sectors. In 2013, four people were killed and more than 40 injured in an attack by members of the Pakistani Taliban, an extremist group that views Shiites as heretics.
As security has deteriorated in much of Pakistan, Ismailis had been spared the worst of the violence. The bus that was attacked Wednesday was traveling without any security, a sign that the group had not felt itself to be a major target, said Amir Rana, an Islamabadbased security expert and head of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
Pakistani militant groups have been seeking out “soft targets” such as the Ismaili community since the army launched an offensive against extremist hide-outs in the northern tribal belt in mid-2014, Rana said.
More than 160 Shiites have been killed in Pakistan this year, far more than in all of 2014, which had seen a substantial drop in sectarian violence, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which studies the issue.
“The lives of minorities, whether they are religious, ethnic or sectarian, have been becoming more difficult with every passing day,” said Tauseef Ahmed Khan, former chairman of the Department of Mass Communication at Federal Urdu University in Karachi.
Pakistani security officials say they have killed more than 700 Taliban members in Karachi. But Khan and others say the killings of militants won’t stop the violence in a city that is awash with weapons.
“The most important thing is to stop the flow of arms in the city,” Khan said. Karachi police reported finding pamphlets at the scene of the attack that referred to Islamic State, the militant group based in Iraq and Syria that has been trying to gain a toehold in South Asia. Investigators said the materials contained no information about the attack and could have been planted as a diversion.
Jundallah, a Pakistani Taliban splinter group, claimed responsibility for the attack. It declared allegiance to Islamic State in November.