Shia cleric shot dead in Pakistan
Afp, Quetta
Gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead a minority Shia Muslim cleric Friday in a remote southwestern Pakistani town, police said, in the latest suspected sectarian killing to hit the country. Religious leader Allamma Badar-ud-Din was ambushed by two armed men as he left his home to go to a mosque in Dera Murad Jamali, some 240 kilometres south of Quetta, police said. "The attackers were riding a motorcycle and fled after the shooting," local police officer Khalid Magsi told AFP by telephone. The small town was tense after the attack and security has been stepped up with extra police deployed in Quetta, the capital of volatile Baluchistan province. A spokesman for Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned extremist group loyal to Pakistan's majority Sunni Muslim community, called newspaper offices in Quetta and claimed responsibility for the attack.
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