KARACHI: Twelve people were killed in violence in Karachi when a suicide attack on a mosque blamed on a group linked to Al Qaeda spiralled into a riot. Six people were burnt to death in an attack on a KFC restaurant.
Angry protesters set fire to the restaurant in revenge after five people were killed and 18 wounded in the Monday night suicide bomb blast at a Shi'ite mosque in Karachi's middle-class Gulshan-e-Iqbal district, police said yesterday.
The mob torched the KFC outlet minutes after the blast at the mosque, and then ransacked a hospital, two petrol stations and burned more than a dozen vehicles.
The latest violence came three days after a suicide bombing at a festival in Islamabad killed 19 people, mostly Shi'ites, the worst-ever attack in Pakistan's capital.
A crowd of Shi'ite youths chanting "Down with America" tried to set fire to another KFC outlet yesterday during a funeral for a victim of Monday's attack, but police repelled them with batons.
Police also detained about two dozen protesters who threw stones at cars, shops and police.
Police said intelligence agents suspect Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned Sunni Muslim militant group with ties to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, had planned the mosque attack.
"The pattern of this attack has many similarities with attacks they have carried out in the recent past," said the district's police chief, Asif Ajaz Sheikh.
"We are working on several other leads too."
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is one of Pakistan's most feared underground militant groups. Its members have been implicated in attacks on Western targets in Karachi, including the kidnap and murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
The group has also been blamed for two assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf and carried out dozens of deadly attacks on the minority Shi'ite community.
More than 100 people have been killed in tit-for-tat attacks between Sunnis and Shi'ites in the past year alone.
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