LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - Gunmen riding a motorcycle shot dead a noted Pakistani Islamic scholar, Ghulam Murtaza Malik, in the central city of Lahore on Tuesday night in the country's latest religious killing, police said.
They said the two unknown assailants also killed Malik's driver and a police constable who chased them in southern Lahore, capital of the populous Punjab province.
Police said they had no immediate information about the motive for Malik's murder, which follows a recent wave of deadly attacks blamed on rival groups from the majority Sunni and the minority Shi'ite sects of Islam and often carried out by motorcyclists.
The 62-year-old Malik was a Sunni scholar famous for his Islamic television lectures.
Twelve women and children were killed and 23 people were wounded when a bomb was set off at a Shi'ite mosque in the Punjab town of Bhakkar on April 25.
Violence between Sunni and Shi'ite sects has killed hundreds of people in Pakistan over the last decade.
Shi'ites make up about 15 percent of Pakistan's 140 million Sunni-dominated population.
Tension between the two communities rose after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighbouring Iran. Members of the two branches of Islam eat, work and socialise together, but intermarriage is rare.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in January vowed to clamp down on sectarian extremism as part of the broader crackdown on Islamic militants.
Hundreds of activists from radical Sunni and Shi'ite groups were detained. Most have since been freed for lack of evidence.
Musharraf has thrown his weight behind the U.S.-led war on terror since the September 11 attacks on the United States, drawing the ire of some Islamic militant groups.
Five people, including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat, were killed when an attacker threw grenades in a Protestant church in Islamabad's diplomatic enclave in March.