At least five people, including two assailants, were killed in a suicide bomb attack on Monday at a Shi’ite mosque in Karachi—the latest incident of religious violence to rock the country, officials said.Eighteen people were wounded, four seriously, in the attack at the Shi’ite Mandinatul Ilm mosque in the middle-class Gulshan-e-Iqbal area of Karachi, hospital officials said.Monday’s attack comes after a suicide bombing at a Muslim festival in the capital Islamabad on Friday that killed at least 19 people, mostly Shi’ite Muslims.Senior Karachi police officer Gul Hameed Sammo said two attackers were killed including one who blew himself up, while a third was unconscious and in critical condition in hospital. Police said explosives and detonators were found strapped to the bodies of the other attackers.Police officer Asif Aijaz Shaikh said one attacker snatched a gun from a police guard at the mosque and shot him dead. ‘‘When they heard the fire, the two other police guards responded and opened fire on the two assailants standing outside,’’ he said. ‘‘At this point, the assailant inside the mosque blew himself up.’’Mobs of angry Shi’ite youths stoned and set fire to a nearby outlet of the American fast food chain KFC and also attacked a hospital and two petrol stations. ‘‘The situation got totally out of control in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. Angry mobs were on the street and were not allowing police and ambulances to enter the affected place,’’ Haider said.Hours earlier in Karachi, unknown assailants killed a provincial leader from the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal Islamic Opposition alliance, police said. Aslam Mujahid, deputy chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Karachi, was kidnapped early in the day and his bullet-riddled body was later found in an abandoned car in the east of the city. —Reuters
