Eight killed in Pakistan shrine bombing

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KARACHI, Oct 8 (AFP): Two bombs ripped through a Sufi shrine in Karachi killing at least eight worshippers, including two children, as Pakistan battles a wave of violence linked to Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists.
Senior police official Hamid Parhial said 65 people were also wounded in the suspected suicide attack late Thursday in Karachi, a teeming port city that is a maelstrom of communal and criminal violence.
The bombs exploded at the entrance of the shrine to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, a saint in the Sufi mystical strain of Islam, as devotees packed it for a weekly gathering in the city's seaside Clifton district.
Witness Gul Mohammad said he was outside the shrine when two huge blasts were heard in quick succession. "I rushed inside and saw blood and human flesh," he said.
"Some bodies were lying on the ground and several people wounded in the blasts were crying in pain. Then ambulances started arriving and moving the injured to hospitals."
Doctor Seemin Jamali of Civil Hospital Karachi said 10 women and seven children with serious injuries were among those admitted.
"It was a terrorist attack," said Sindh provincial home minister Zulfikar Mirza, who said the government had decided to seal all shrines in the city immediately over security fears.
A bomb attack in July at a popular Sufi site in the eastern city of Lahore killed more than 40 people. Militant Islamists see visits to Sufi shrines and some rituals as un-Islamic.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the Pakistani Taliban has been blamed for similar bombings in the past.