Gunmen opened fire Monday on a taxi in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta, gripped by a wave of sectarian bloodshed, killing two people from the minority Shiite community, police said.<\/p>\n
The attack came on the busy Iqbal avenue in Quetta, the capital of insurgency-hit Baluchistan province, where a recent surge in sectarian unrest has killed scores of Shiites.<\/p>\n
“The driver and a passenger boarding taxi cab, both were Shiite. They died after unknown gunmen fired at their car,” Fayyaz Sumbal, a senior police official in Quetta told AFP.<\/p>\n
He said the two attackers were waiting for the taxi to arrive at the busy avenue and escaped on a motorbike after spraying bullets at the vehicle.<\/p>\n
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant group officially banned by the government in 2002 usually claims responsiblity for attacks on Shiite Muslims.<\/p>\n
Baluchistan is a flashpoint for sectarian violence between Pakistan’s majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shiites, who account for 20 percent of the country’s 180 million population.<\/p>\n
The province bordering Iran and Afghanistan is also rife with Islamist militancy and a regional insurgency waged by separatists demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region’s natural resources.<\/p>\n
Source:AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gunmen opened fire Monday on a taxi in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta, gripped by a wave of sectarian bloodshed, killing two people from the minority Shiite community, police said.<\/p>\n
The attack came on the busy Iqbal avenue in Quetta, the capital of insurgency-hit Baluchistan province, where a recent surge in sectarian unrest has killed scores of Shiites.<\/p>\n
“The driver and a passenger boarding taxi cab, both were Shiite. They died after unknown gunmen fired at their car,” Fayyaz Sumbal, a senior police official in Quetta told AFP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":10040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}