A Pakistani group that has affiliated itself to Islamic State (Isis) has killed more than 60 people in a bombing of a Shia mosque, one of the deadliest sectarian atrocities in years.
The explosive device ripped through a Shia imambargah, or prayer hall, in the southern Pakistani city of Shikarpur during the weekly Friday prayers when the building was packed with around 400 worshippers.
Saqib Ismail Memon, police chief of the city in Sindh province, said it was unclear whether the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber or a device left in the building.
Either way, the huge explosion was felt for miles around and had enough force to wound 60 more worshippers and cause a section of the building to collapse.
Witnesses said people frantically attempted to dig bodies out of the rubble while others were rushed to hospital in cars and rickshaws.
“The area is scattered with blood and flesh and it smells of burnt meat, people are screaming at each other … it is chaos,” said a witness, Zahid Noon.
Mohabbat Ali Bablani, a Shikarpur resident, said four of his cousins, aged between 30 and 40, were killed in the blast while his friend had lost five children, all under 13. “Nizam-ud-Din Sheikh has lost his five sons. He had taken them with him to offer prayers and all of them were killed in the attack,” he said.
Fahad Marwat, a spokesman for a militant Sunni group called Jundullah, told Reuters they had targeted the building because the Shias “are our enemies”.
Little is known with certainty about the shadowy group, itself an offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban, a once dominant but now increasingly frayed national militant alliance.
Jundullah has been linked to a number of major attacks including the suicide bombing of a church in the city of Peshawar in 2013 that killed around 80 Christians.
In November the group said it had sworn allegiance to Isis.
At the time a spokesman claimed Jundullah had met a three-man delegation from Isis, although analysts disagree over the extent of Isis’s influence in Pakistan, which is already home to dozens of established militant groups.
Many of them share aims and ideas, including a hatred of Pakistan’s Shia minority, whom they consider heretics and worthy of death.
The rise of Isis in Iraq has electrified many jihadists in Pakistan and pro-Isis leaflets, graffiti and posters have appeared around the country.
Friday’s bombing was the most deadly single sectarian attack since March 2013, when a car bomb killed 45 people in a Shia neighbourhood of the port city of Karachi.
Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen, a Shia organisation, has called for a province-wide strike on Saturday in protest at the Shikarpur killing.
The attack comes at a time when the government is attempting to enact a 20-point national action plan to eradicate terrorism and extremism in the wake of the December attack on a the Army public school in Peshawar that killed more than 130 schoolboys.
To that end the government has reinstated the death penalty for convicted terrorists and agreed to set up military courts to hear terrorism cases.
Many analysts fret, however, that the government will struggle to combat Pakistan’s deeply entrenched network of jihadists and their sympathisers.