Minority minister assassinated in Pakistan

PESHAWAR: A provincial Pakistani minister for minority affairs was Friday shot dead in his car by men on motorbikes in the country’s restive northwest, officials said.
Sardar Soran Singh had held one of several seats reserved for religious minorities in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly.
Singh was a leading figure in Pakistan’s tiny Sikh community and an adviser to a provincial chief minister, representing cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s opposition Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party.
“Gunmen riding on two motorbikes came in front of the car and started indiscriminate firing which killed the minister on the spot,” Khalid Hamadani, district police chief told AFP.
He said the minister received several bullets to his head in a shooting which took place in Buner district, some 160 km northeast of Peshawar city.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the killing but Taliban militants regularly attack security forces and civilians in the province.
Singh had come from Peshawar to his native village in the Buner valley when he was attacked by gunmen, local police officer Shaukat Khan said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility by any group.
The PTI condemned the killing, saying that Islam’s laws and the Pakistani constitution provided for the protection of religious minorities.
“The brutal killing of Soran Singh is extremely saddening,” a PTI statement attributed to Khan said, describing Singh as a patriotic Pakistani and a loyal party worker.
Sikhs make up less than 1 percent of Pakistan’s 190 million people but many of them see Pakistan as the place where their religion began.
According to police, at least eight Sikhs have been killed in the northwest in 2013 and 2014 - the first recorded sectarian killings of Sikhs in Pakistani history.