Victims injured in Monday’s suicide bombing are treated at a hospital in Quetta.
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Two journalists who had been covering the event for Pakistani TV were killed, but numerous dead and wounded were lawyers.
Pakistani hospitals have been targeted by militants before, with a bomb killing 13 at a Karachi hospital in 2010. The bomber killed dozens of people and wounded.
The explosion also injured at least 60 others, said Rehmat Baloch, the health minister of Balochistan province. The lawyers boycotted all courts in the country while observing mourning for their colleagues.
In January, a suicide bomber killed 15 people outside a polio eradication center in an attack claimed by both the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, an Islamist militant group that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State in the Middle East. Pakistan deployed extra police units outside court building. In Islamabad, lawyers lined up outside the Supreme Court under tight security to offer funeral prayers for those killed in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province. The perpetrators “cannot be called humans”, he said with anger. “They kill people to spread fear”, Hussein said.
“Deliberately attacking people gathered at a hospital to grieve for Mr Kasi underscores the inhumanity and moral bankruptcy of those who planned and perpetrated it”, Prove said.
China on Tuesday condemned the terrorist attack at a hospital in Pakistan and said that it stands behind its ally in the fight against terrorism and its efforts to maintain stability. IS’s media arm, the Aamaq News Agency, posted on its Twitter account that a “martyrdom-seeking soldier from the Islamic State” detonated his explosives amid a lawyers’ gathering in Quetta. The IS statement did not mention the killing of Kasi.
Baluchistan, which borders Afghanistan, is home to many militant groups, most notably sectarian outfits who have launched a campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations of ethnic Hazaras – Persian-speaking Shi’ites who mostly emigrated from Afghanistan and are a small minority of the Shi’ite population in Sunni-majority Pakistan.
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Later, however, Islamic State said one of its fighters carried out the attack, in what would mark an escalation in the ability of the group, or its regional offshoots, to strike in Pakistan.
