Suicide bomber kills 38 at Pakistan funeral - The Telegraph

At least 38 mourners were killed and 60 injured today when a #suicide #bomber #attacked the funeral of a police officer murdered in #Quetta, #Pakistan earlier this week.

Several of the city's most senior officers are among the dead.

Police in the city said the toll was expected to rise higher because many of those injured were in a critical condition.

The attack was condemned by Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister, who ordered his interior minister to visit Quetta and present a new security strategy amid an upsurge in terrorist attacks.

Eleven people were killed and 27 injured, many of them young boys, in the early hours of Wednesday morning when terrorists targeted a state minister in Karachi. The day before, police discovered the bodies of 13 people who had been dragged from a convoy of buses in south-west Baluchistan and shot dead.

In Thursday's attack, the suicide bomber detonated his explosives as he was being questioned by police officers as he approached the funeral being held in a field by a mosque in Quetta, the state capital of Baluchistan.

Deputy Inspector General Fayaz Sumbal, the province's police operations chief, was one of three senior officers killed in the attack. More than 30 of the victims were police officers attending the funeral of another officer who was shot dead earlier in the day while he was in a car with his two children. They were also injured in the attack on their father's funeral.

DIG Sumbal had sent some of his officers to question the suicide bomber as he approached the funeral, minutes before he detonated his explosives.

Fellow officers who survived the attack said the bomber had left scenes of carnage in his wake and called for those who planned the attack to be "hunted down". They believe the bomber had targeted Quetta's city police chief who was at the funeral but unhurt in the explosion.

Sajjad Tareen, Superintendent of Police in charge of the city's crime department, said he had survived because he had been out of range at the time of the explosion but several of his close colleagues had been killed.

"We are still doing rescue work at the blast site. Many of my own friends who were policemen have been killed. We can just pray right now but we will go after these elements and, insh'Allah, catch them," he said. The Telegraph Reported