In the country's deadliest sectarian attack in nearly two years, a powerful bomb exploded in a busy Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan on Friday, killing close to 50 people . The blast hit the mosque in Shikarpur in Sindh province, north of Karachi, as hundreds of worshippers attended Friday prayers. Pakistan has suffered a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiite Muslims, who make up around one in five of the population. Earlier, Sindh health minister Jam Mehtab Daher said that "a total of 40 have been killed in the attack, 46 others have been wounded". Hundreds of people rushed to the scene after the blast to try to dig out survivors trapped under the roof of the mosque, which collapsed in the explosion, witness Zahid Noon said. Television footage of the aftermath showed chaotic rescue scenes as people piled the wounded into cars, motorbikes and rickshaws to take them for treatment. An official with a national Shiite organisation, Rahat Kazmi, said that up to 400 people were worshipping in the mosque when the blast struck. Sainrakhio Mirani, police chief of the region said that officers were still working to determine whether it was a suicide bombing or whether the 6-7 kilogramme bomb was detonated remotely. It is the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since March 2013, when a car bomb in a Shiite neighbourhood of Karachi killed 45. A spokesman for the shadowy Jandullah militant group, a splinter faction of the Pakistani Taliban, said they were behind the blast. "We claim responsibility for attack on Shiites in Shikarpur very happily," Ahmed Marwat announced. Friday's attack came as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, to discuss the law and order situation in the city. Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city and economic heart, has wrestled for several years with a bloody wave of criminal, sectarian and political murders. Anti-Shiite attacks have been increasing in recent years in Karachi and also in the southwestern city of Quetta, the northwestern area of Parachinar and the far northeastern town of Gilgit. Around 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, with many of the attacks claimed by the hardline Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).
