LAHORE: Suicide bombers attacked a mosque and a religious school within minutes yesterday in two Pakistani cities, leaving one of the country’s most prominent anti-Taleban religious figures dead in what authorities called a targeted killing.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for either blast, but relatives of Sarfraz Naeemi said he had received death threats recently after condemning suicide attacks as un-Islamic and the Taleban as murderers.
Pakistan has been rocked by a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks in recent weeks blamed on militants taking revenge for a military operation against the Taleban in the Swat Valley region. More than 100 people have been killed since May 27, and places of worship have been targeted three times since last Friday.
The government has vowed to rid the country of militants, and it has been emboldened by broad support for the Swat campaign from a public that has started openly denouncing the militants after years of ambivalence. After the blast that killed Naeemi, hundreds of outraged seminary students gathered at the scene and demanded the Taleban leave Pakistan.
Police official Sohail Sukhera said at least one assailant entered the offices of the Jamia Naeemia seminary in the heart of Lahore shortly after the end of Friday prayers and detonated a bomb powerful enough to collapse the building. Two people died and six were wounded. Naeemi was the apparent target of the attack and died on his way to a hospital, said his son, Waqar. “I was still in the mosque when I heard a big bang. We rushed toward the office and there was a smell of explosives in the air. There was blood and several people were crying in pain,” Waqar said.
Television footage showed Naeemi’s body lying on a stretcher, his beard and hair covered in dust and blood stains around his nostrils. Naeemi had recently led dozens of moderate religious figures in meetings and lectures in which he denounced suicide attacks — a common tactic of Pakistan’s Islamist groups — and supported the military’s operation to oust the Taleban from Swat. Naeemi’s brother Mohammad Tajwar said the cleric had recently received death threats but had refused the offer of police protection.
In the second attack around the same time yesterday, a pickup truck loaded with explosives was rammed into the wall of a mosque in an area where soldiers live in Noshehra, a small city in the northwest, police official Aziz Khan said.
At least four people died and more than 100 were wounded, he said. Militants were blamed for a suicide attack a week earlier on a mosque in Upper Dir that killed at least 30 people.
Fierce fighting continued in Swat yesterday, the military said, where troops captured Chuprial town in a major battle that killed 39 militants and 10 soldiers.
