By DPA,
Islamabad : Thousands of people Saturday attended the funeral of the victims killed in two bombings in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi.
The toll in Friday’s attacks has now risen to 33.
An explosion ripped through a bus carrying Shia Muslims to a religious gathering. Around two hours later, the second bombing took place at a state-run hospital where the dead bodies and injured were rushed.
Sagheer Ahmad, health minister in Sindh province of which Karachi is the capital, announced that eight more people had died of their injuries overnight.
“The overall death toll now stands at 33 while 167 people were injured,” Ahmad told DPA, adding that 89 of the injured are still being treated at various hospitals.
Thousands of Shia Muslims gathered Saturday to attend the funeral of 14 of the victims in a sports ground. Dressed in black, the men and women beat their chests.
Some of the mourners wore white overalls symbolising the kaffan – a white shroud Muslims use to cover the dead when they are buried – to show defiance to the terrorists, reported Samaa television.
The funerals of three Christians killed in the hospital blast were held at the city’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
The police and paramilitary troops patrolled the city where the streets were deserted and the businesses and educational institutions remained closed.
The riots erupted Dec 28 when a bombing at a Shia gathering killed more than 40 people and injured dozens more. Angry mob ransacked and burnt hundreds of shops in the Karachi, which is Pakistan’s commercial hub.
The security officials initially suspected the Friday’s attacks were carried out by suicide bombers, but a senior police officer, Raja Umar Khattab, told reporters that the explosive devices were planted in two motorbikes.
The police defused a third bomb in the parking lot of the hospital, not far from the scene of the second bombing.
Khattab claimed that a Pakistani Sunni militant group the Jundullah (Army of God) was behind the lethal attacks.
The group, which is sometimes confused with the Iranian Sunni terror outfit Jundullah, is believed to have been founded by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The banned organisation is suspected for several bombings in its main base Karachi on Pakistani and western officials, including the March 2006 suicide bombing near the US consulate on the eve of former president George W. Bush’s visit.