At least five people, including two assailants, were killed in a suicide bomb attack on Monday at Muslim mosque in southern Pakistan, the latest religious violence to rock the country, officials said.

Eighteen people were wounded, four seriously, in the attack at a minority Shi'ite Mandinatul Ilm mosque in the middle-class Gulshan-e-Iqbal area of Karachi, hospital officials said.

It was the latest incident of religious violence to hit one of Washington's main allies in its war on terrorism and came 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.
 
Provincial opposition leader killed

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 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.

Mairaj-ul-Huda, head of Jamaat-e-Islami's Karachi wing, said Mujahid was kidnapped after the funeral of a party member.

Huda said the party suspected the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a rival regional party that is a member of the governing national coalition, was behind the killing.

"The city has been put on high alert," Rauf Siddiqui, home minister for the southern province of Sindh, of which Karachi is the capital, told Reuters.

"We have ordered all police stations to remain on high alert and have asked the police and rangers to increase patrolling."

"The blast, and the killing of Aslam Mujahid earlier in the day show that all these activities are planned," he said, adding that a reward of 2.5 million rupees (US$42,000) had been offered for information about Mujahid's assassins.

More than 100 people have been killed in tit-for-tat attacks by majority Sunni and Shi'ite militants in the past year.

Most attacks have been blamed on Sunni militant groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network which have been angered by Pakistan's support for the war on terrorism.

Before dawn on Monday, security forces arrested three members of the outlawed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Sunni militant group in the city of Sargodha. An intelligence official said they had been found with grenades and were planning suicide attacks.

(Chinadaily.com via agencies May 31, 2005)