Moderate Cleric Among 9 Killed in Pakistan Blasts
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Students in the religious school run by Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi mourned after a bomber killed him in Lahore, Pakistan, on Friday.
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Akhtar Soomro/Reuters
In Nowshera, Pakistan, at least three people were reported killed and 20 wounded in a bombing of a mosque.
He was killed, along with at least five other people. The whitewashed brick wall of the office where he usually sat after delivering his Friday sermon was spattered with blood.
Another mosque was bombed in Nowshera, northwest of the capital, killing at least 3 people and wounded more than 20, according to Pakistani television news reports.
Friday’s attacks were the latest in a rash of suicide bombings and other militant attacks in Pakistan, where the government has begun a military campaign to curb a spreading insurgency, an effort strongly supported by the United States.
The string of attacks, which included a truck bombing at the Pearl Continental Hotel on Tuesday, have deepened anger among Pakistanis against the Taliban. Shortly after Friday’s explosion in Lahore, hundreds of mourners gathered in the mosque’s pink and red hall. Enraged crowds chanted “Death to the Taliban.”
President Asif Ali Zardari, in a televised address broadcast after 1 a.m. on Saturday, condemned the attacks and vowed to continue the fight against the militants.
“We will continue this war to the end,” he said, according to Reuters. “This war has the support of Parliament, the support of the political parties as well as the people of Pakistan.”
The Lahore attacker was clean-shaven, not bearded like many religious Pakistanis, according to the police and mosque officials who saw the attacker’s head after the blast. He appeared to be about 18 to 20 years old, the police said. They said the bomber was a resident of southern Punjab, the populous province whose capital is Lahore.
Mr. Naeemi followed a school of thought within Sunni Islam in Pakistan, the Barelvi, which is at odds with the more fundamentalist Deobandi school observed by the Taliban. In 2007, he and other clerics issued an edict against suicide bombing, saying that only the state can wage jihad, not individuals or groups such as the Taliban.
He had supported the military offensive in Swat and had termed Taliban a “stigma on Islam.” This month, he and other leading clerics led a rally in Lahore condemning the Taliban as “enemies of Islam and traitors.”
In his speech on Saturday, Mr. Zardari said Mr. Naeemi and the other people killed in the bombings were martyrs.
The attacker entered from a small door near the cleric’s office, police officials said, which opens to the street. Mr. Naeemi finished his Friday sermon around 2 p.m. The bomb went off an hour later.
A student at the religious school run by Mr. Naeemi, Sajid Mahmood, said he was having lunch in his room on the second floor when the bomb went off.
“I thought the whole building had collapsed,” he said. “I rushed down the stairs, and when I reached the bottom I saw Naeemi Sahib and three other people injured,” he said, using the term of respect for Mr. Naeemi.
The religious complex run by Mr. Naeemi is located in Garhi Shahu, a congested working-class neighborhood of Lahore. It is considered to be one of the most prominent Islamic schools in the country and was founded in the 1960s. The building has an open courtyard surrounded by dormitories and classrooms.
The school has 10 branches in and around Lahore.
Sahibzada Fazal Kareem, a member of the National Assembly and chairman of Sunni Ittihad Council, an alliance of religious parties opposed to the Taliban, called Mr. Naeemi’s killing a “national tragedy.”
“The government should have provided security to Sunni clerics,” Mr. Kareem said in a telephone interview. “The killing of Mr. Naeemi is an extreme act of terrorism.”
Waqar Gillani reported from Lahore, and Sabrina Tavernise from Islamabad, Pakistan. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.
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