Police clashed with rioting mourners yesterday as thousands gathered in Karachi for the funerals of 19 killed in an apparent suicide bombing that ripped through a crowded Shiite Muslim mosque, the latest terrorist attack to hit Pakistan's largest city.
Angry Shiites ransacked several shops and hurled stones near the mosque hit in Monday's bombing, as a huge funeral procession descended into violence along a highway in the southern city.
The bombing was the fourth terrorist incident in a month in Karachi, a centre of sectarian attacks in recent years.
President Pervez Musharraf, who has vowed to crack down on Islamic militancy and has banned several sectarian groups, promised to take action to stop violence in the city.
The blast during evening prayers on Monday also wounded at least 50 people, some seriously.
The attack set off a wave of violent protest in which three people died as angry demonstrators clashed with riot police across the city.
The attack on the Ali Raza Imam Bargah mosque, in a well-off suburb of Karachi, followed Sunday's killing of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a senior priest from Pakistan's majority Sunni Muslim sect.
The blast, about 7.45pm, resonated for blocks around the mosque and blew out windows, witnesses said.
Local news channels were filled with images of badly burnt worshippers being carried to ambulances and of rescue workers scrambling to help the wounded.
"It was apparently a suicide attack, because we did not find any crater caused by a bomb explosion," a police official said yesterday. "We could not gather much evidence because angry people did not allow us to enter the mosque. The situation is tense. There is a high deployment of police and rangers in Shiite areas."
The volatile city had feared fresh inter-Muslim sectarian violence after Mufti Shamzai's killing, and the blast came despite the deployment of 15,000 police and paramilitary troops to guard mosques, in anticipation of a backlash.
Enraged Shiite rioters set fire to 20 vehicles, two filling stations and a local bank office on Monday night.
Police shot and killed three rioters who hijacked an ambulance and fired on police and troops. Police fired repeated volleys of tear gas to disperse the protesters.
The mosque struck in the bombing was about one kilometre from where Mufti Shamzai, a pro-Taliban priest who called for a jihad against the US, was killed a day earlier.
While the latest bombing smacked of domestic sectarianism, ingrained hatred for the US surfaced among Shiites, many of whom chanted: "Down with America".
Diplomats and analysts have expressed fears the new round of sectarian violence could provoke attacks on Western and other minority targets.
Violence between Sunnis, who make up about 70 per cent of Pakistan's 97 per cent majority Muslim population, and Shiites, who account for 20 per cent, has plagued the country for decades. It has caused the deaths of more than 150 people in the past year.