Funeral prayers of Taftan tragedy victims offered
Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM) has announced three-day mourning across the country.
KOHAT (Dunya News) – The dead bodies of the victims of Taftan tragedy were brought to Peshawar by a special C-130 plane.
Eleven dead bodies were shifted to Kohat where funeral prayers of the victims were offered. Hangu Road had been closed on this occasion.
The funeral prayers of the victims belonging to Orakzai Agency were offered in their ancestral areas where a large number of people attended the funeral.
Meanwhile, funeral prayers of three Taftan tragedy victims were offered in Quetta and they were laid to rest in Hazara Graveyard.
At least four injured persons including three women were also shifted from Quetta to Peshawar. A case had been registered in Levis Police Station Taftan.
On the other hand, Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM) and other organizations have announced three-day mourning to condemn and protest the incident.
According to AFP, at least 25 pilgrims, including 10 women were killed in a gun and suicide attack on the restive Pakistan-Iran border on Sunday, the latest assault on the beleaguered minority sect.
The attack late Sunday night came when a bus carrying Pakistani pilgrims returning from a visit to holy Muslim sites in Iran stopped at a restaurant in the Pakistani town of Taftan in troubled Baluchistan province.
"In total 24 Shiite pilgrims including 10 women were killed in the attack. There are 13 others including eight women and five men who were wounded," Akbar Durrani, a province official, told AFP.
"Four suicide bombers attacked the restaurants in Taftan," which is around 700 kilometres (430 miles) southwest of the provincial capital Quetta, he added.
Authorities airlifted the bodies to the northwestern city of Kohat where most of the victims were from, Durrani said.
In a separate incident Monday, two paramilitary soldiers were killed and three others were injured in an IED blast in Mashkay town in Awaran district of Baluchistan.
Resource-rich Balochistan is home to a long-running separatist conflict that was revived in 2004, with nationalists seeking to stop what they see as the exploitation of the region s natural resources and alleged rights abuses.
Attacks by separatist insurgents on security forces are also common.
And in further bloodshed, a suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden pickup truck into a military checkpoint, this time on Pakistan s border with Afghanistan, killing at least three soldiers and himself, officials said.
