Pakistani lawyers mourn colleagues slain in Quetta attack

This news story is related to Latest/141267-Google-pays-homage-to-victims-of-Quetta-bomb-blast/ – breaking news, latest news, pakistan ne.

More than 70 people died in Monday’s attack.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the victims in the hospital.

Another witness, lawyer Abdul Latif, said he had just arrived at the hospital to express his grief over Kasi’s killing, and was horrified to “see the bodies of dozens of other lawyers” lying in pools of blood on the floor.

(AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary). People rally to condemn a bombing in Quetta that killed dozens of people, in Lahore, Pakistan, Monday, Aug. 8, 2016. Earlier this year, the son of the supreme chief justice of Sindh High Court was kidnapped, and a suicide bomb attack outside a courtroom in Pakistan’s north-east killed 11 people in March.

Pakistan’s lawyers boycotted courts and staged protests nationwide Tuesday after a horrific suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital which killed 70 people including many of their colleagues. However, if ISIS was behind the attack, it would be the first manifestation of their presence in the country.

A senior police official said Kasi was shot and killed by gunmen as he was on his way to his office. In Islamabad, lawyers lined up outside the Supreme Court under tight security to offer funeral prayers for those killed in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province. The perpetrators “cannot be called humans”, he said with anger.

The council urged the federal and the provincial governments to provide compensation to the families of the deceased; 7 million Pakistani rupees ($66,900) for each lawyer who was killed and 3.5 million Pakistani rupees for each injured, Dawn online noted.

Another lawyer, Rehmatullah Khan, said he was missing his friends and colleagues.

Pervez Masi, who was injured by pieces of flying glass, said the blast was so powerful that “we didn’t know what had happened”.

At a Quetta market, Mohammad Saleem, a resident of the city, said everyone was still in a state of shock. “Various segments of society have been put under pressure in the past, have been made to feel insecure, and it could be a continuation of that dark strategy of making the society generally fearful and less confident as people go about their daily lives”, he said.

Medical staff said up to 60 of those slain in the bombing at a government hospital were lawyers who had gathered to mourn the assassination earlier on Monday of the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, Bilal Anwar Kasi. The group has been behind several attacks in Pakistan in recent years.

ISIS was one of two Islamist militant groups to claim responsibility for the atrocity, although officials and analysts said they had doubts over whether it was behind the blast.

“A martyrdom bomber of the Islamic State detonates his explosive belt on a group of personnel belonging to the Ministry of Justice and the Pakistani Police in the city of Quetta”, Amaq said. The IS statement did not mention the killing of Kasi.

The Sunni militant group, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria, has also garnered some support and wanna-be affiliates surface in Pakistan.