Quetta blast: Protestors demand protection
Sit-in demonstrations were held in several cities and towns across the country.
QUETTA (AFP) - Thousands of women refused Monday to bury victims of Quetta carnage and a shutter-down strike is being observed in Karachi as protesters across the country demanded protection for Shias.
Up to 4,000 women began their sit-in in Quetta Sunday evening, a day after a bomb in the city killed 81 members of Shia community including nine women and two girls aged seven and nine.
The women blocked a road and refused to bury the dead until authorities take action against the extremists behind the attack, which wounded 178 people.
The bomb, containing nearly a tonne of explosives hidden in a water tanker, tore through a crowded market in Hazara Town, on the edge of the city on Saturday evening.
It was the second deadly blast in the city in little over a month.
The sit-in continued Monday at Hazara Town and near a local station, said Wazir Khan Nasir, police chief of Quetta which is the capital of the southwestern province of Baluchistan.
"We are going to resume negotiations with the Shiite community leaders this morning to convince them to bury the dead," Nasir told AFP.
However a local Shia party leader, Qayyum Changezi, said the protesters "will not bury the dead until a targeted operation is launched".
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned the bomb blast and called on authorities to act quickly against those responsible.
Sit-in demonstrations were held in several cities and towns across the country demanding an end to the killing of Shiites.
Public transport drivers and traders stopped work in Karachi Monday after a Shia party called a protest strike, residents said.
Schools were closed, traffic was off the roads and attendance in offices was thin in the city. Several political and religious parties have backed the strike call.
"We will continue our peaceful struggle for protection of the Shia community," said a Shiite party leader, Hasan Zafar Naqvi.
Saturday s attack takes the death toll in sectarian attacks in Pakistan this year to almost 200 compared with more than 400 in the whole of 2012 -- a year which Human Rights Watch described as the deadliest on record for Shias.
A double suicide bombing on a snooker club in Quetta on January 10 killed at least 92 people, the deadliest-ever single attack on the community in Pakistan.
No one has been arrested for that attack and Daud Agha, chairman of the Shia Conference, told AFP anger was rising in the community.
Although it is customary for Muslims to bury the dead swiftly, protesters after the snooker club bombing refused to do so, prompting Islamabad to sack the provincial government.
Activists say the failure of the judiciary to prosecute sectarian killers allows them to operate with impunity.
Balochistan governor Zulfiqar Magsi pointed the finger at the security forces over the latest atrocity.
"Repeated occurrence of such attacks is a failure of our intelligence agencies," he told reporters late Saturday.
"Our security institutions, police, FC (paramilitary Frontier Corps) and others are either scared or cannot take action against them."
But Balochistan home secretary Akbar Hussain Durrani said authorities were already taking action. "Law enforcement agencies have arrested so many suspects and seized huge cache of arms," Durrani said.
Pakistan is due to hold a general election in coming months but there are fears that rising violence could force the postponement of polls.
