A gruesome suicide bombing midday Monday left at least 70 people dead outside a hospital in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, a lot of them lawyers who had rushed there to protest and mourn the earlier killing of a local bar-association leader.
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The explosion went off as some 200 lawyers gathered outside the hospital to mourn the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, Bilal Kasi, who had been shot dead earlier in the day.
Monday’s attack on a hospital in the southwestern city of Quetta was one of the deadliest in the country’s long battle against militancy. “What kind of weak and despicable people are they, targeting a hospital where there are children and patients?”
Lawyers speak with the media after protesting against the suicide bomb attack at civil hospital, Quetta on Monday, outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad.
The Pakistani bar association called for lawyers to boycott courts in an unusual strike against the attack. There are several ethnic Baluch separatist groups operating in the resource-rich province, but al-Qaida and other militant groups also have a presence here. He said lawyers would observe three days of mourning and would not appear in court in solidarity with their colleagues and others killed in the attack.
A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attacks and – no doubt taking a cue from the multimedia experts of the Islamic State – promised to release a video report. Attacks will continue until Islamic law is imposed on Pakistan the organization warned.
Some Pakistani analysts were sceptical.
But ISIS, a jihadi rival to the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, also claimed the attack on its semi-official news agency Amaq. The movement at one time swore fealty to Islamic State’s Middle East leadership, but later switched back to the Taliban.
Abdul Rehman, the director of the Quetta Civil Hospital, said medical teams are also treating 92 wounded people following the explosion at the state-run hospital in the south-western city.
Pakistan’s growing civil society has been vocal of its opposition to the narrow, rigid interpretation of Islam espoused by groups such as the Taliban.
Only last week, Jamaat was added to the United States’ list of global terrorists, triggering sanctions.
The Sunni militant group, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria, has also garnered some support and wanna-be affiliates surface in Pakistan.
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Pakistan is grimly accustomed to atrocities after a almost decade-long insurgency.
