Unidentified gunmen killed at least 17 Shia Muslims, three of them children, when they opened fire at a mosque in a Pakistani village yesterday, police said.
They said four men arrived in a car and two of them randomly fired at a congregation of Shias in Karam Dad Qureshi, a village 35 km east of Multan in Punjab province, killing 17 people and wounding several in what appeared to be a sectarian attack.
Two gunmen entered the mosque where people were studying the Koran after morning prayers and started firing.
One gunman remained at the entrance and one stayed behind in a getaway car when the attack took place at 6.25 a.m. local time police said.
No group immediately admitted responsibility, but police said the attack seemed to be the latest in a series of tit-for-tat killings between rival militant factions from the majority Sunni and the minority Shia sects of Islam.
Sectarian attacks have killed dozens of people in 1998 and more than 140 in 1997 in Punjab province.
Only a nine-year old child escaped unhurt in yesterday's at tack. The gunman at the main entrance fired at anyone attempting to flee the mosque, area residents said.
Outraged residents blamed the government for failing to protect them and chanted anti-government slogans while burning tyres to block the main road leading to the village.
"This is a failure of the government," Mr Sayed Ali Reza Gardezi, a Shia activist, said at the scene of the massacre. "The government has lost justification to govern."
Mr Gardezi said the Shia community had warned the administration of possible attacks and requested protection but the government had failed to provide strong enough security at the mosques.
Other angry Shias at the scene, where the dead lay shrouded in white sheets, accused the Sunni Muslim militant group Sipah-a-Sahaba Pakistan of carrying out the attack but a spokesman denied involvement. Mr Tayabul Qasmi, SSP central secretary for information, said his group strongly condemned the "terrorist" act.
He said it was "unthinkable" for any Muslim group to kill another Muslim, "particularly in Ramadan". Sunni groups accuse predominantly Shia Iran of financing Pakistani Shia militants, while Shias accuse Sunni Saudi Arabia of aiding Sunni militants.
The attack came less than 24 hours after the Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif, narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt, when a bomb exploded on a road he had been due to travel along.
The bomb was planted close to his family farm near Lahore, about 200 km north-east of Multan. It blew up a bridge and killed three civilians.
Yesterday's killings came only two weeks after a special antiterrorism court sentenced to death 14 people from Shia and Sunni groups for sectarian murders. They included eight Sunnis accused of killing an Iranian diplomat and seven employees in an attack on an Iranian cultural centre in Multan in February 1997.
Six others were Shia extremists accused of killing 22 Sunni Muslims in an attack on their mosque in September 1996. Shias form about 20 per cent of the 140 million population of Pakistan.
Meanwhile, in Bangalore, the Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, yesterday accused Pakistan of encouraging "terrorists" and said the weekend attempt on the life of Mr Sharif was the result.
"We have been telling Pakistan to stop encouraging militancy in India and warned them that it would one day boomerang on them," Mr Vajpayee told a public meeting in the southern Indian city.
"They did not listen to us," he said. "Yesterday there was an attempt on the life of their Prime Minister and they have blamed terrorists for the act . . . terrorism has entered Pakistan and is targeting its leaders."
While Lahore police hesitated to speculate on a motive for the blast, Pakistan's Information and Media Development Minister, Mr Mushahid Hussain, said Mr Sharif had been targeted because of his campaign to eradicate political and sectarian violence.