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Blast at Quetta hospital after lawyer killed

Zehri said it appeared to be a suicide attack but police said they were still investigating.

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Last month IS said it carried out twin suicide bombings that left 80 people dead in Kabul, the deadliest attack in the city since 2001.

Egypt condemns “in the strongest terms” a hospital attack that killed 70 people in Pakistan on Monday, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Later on Monday a part of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the massacre, an organization known as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar.

Quetta’s Hazara minority, which is mostly Shiite, has been targeted over and over by Sunni extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

Numerous victims were clad in the black suits and ties traditionally worn by Pakistani lawyers.

Lawyer associations announced seven days of mourning and a one-day boycott of courts all over Pakistan to protest against the bombing.

Friends and relatives of victims grieve at the scene of the bomb blast outside civil hospital, Quetta.

Two unidentified men opened fire at Advocate Kasi’s auto near Quetta’s Mengal Chowk on Manno Jan road as he left his home in the morning for work, police officials said.

The group of lawyers were at the unit because earlier in the day armed men had shot Bilal Anwar Kasi, reports said.

The United States offered Pakistan its cooperation to catch the deadly Quetta bombing culprits.

Hours later, the Islamic State group also said it was behind the blast, which it claimed killed 200 people, the SITE monitoring agency reported.

Even as militant attacks have been down sharply across Pakistan as a whole in the past two years, Baluchistan province, where Quetta is the main city, remains a violent place apart. Islamic State claimed responsibility.

Another 18 bodies were at the military hospital, medic Abdul Hakeem said, while two corpses were taken to Bolan Medical College.

The Prime Minister and Army Chief Raheel Sharif visited the Quetta city and urged the need for a strong mechanism to eradicate the menace of terrorism and extremism.

He instructed local authorities in Baluchistan province, where Quetta is the capital, to maintain utmost vigilance and beef up security. Sharif also asked health workers to provide the best treatment possible to those wounded in the attack.

Senior police official Zahoor Ahmed says also that dozens have been wounded in the explosion.

It also has its own long-running pro-independence insurgency, which government forces have struggled to control.

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Dozens of lawyers had arrived at the hospital to pay their respects and grieve his death after he was gunned down in an attack earlier in the day.

Pakistan