Pakistan’s lawyers boycotted courts and staged protests nationwide yesterday after a horrific suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital which killed 72 people including many of their colleagues.
Monday’s bloodletting, with medics battling to save scores of injured amid scenes of carnage, left the southwestern city reeling.
Police stood guard yesterday at the Civil Hospital, where the bomb tore through a crowd of some 200 lawyers who had gathered there the previous day to mourn the fatal shooting of a colleague.
Officials said yesterday the death toll had increased to 72, with more than 100 injured.
Both the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic State group have asserted responsibility for the attack, though neither claim has been verified by Pakistani authorities.
The IS claim, if true, would make it the group’s deadliest attack so far in Pakistan, where it has struggled for purchase.
Scores of lawyers held rallies in major cities including Islamabad, Karachi and Quetta Tuesday.
“It’s very tragic. Our seniors who were our intellectuals have been killed and may God reward them in heaven,” lawyer Ghulam Mohamed said in Quetta.
Soldiers patrolled near-empty streets in the city as most public transport shut down, with markets and schools closed in mourning.
In Islamabad and in Karachi, lawyers called for the authorities to protect civilians.
“This is not time only for weeping and crying and for lamenting, this is a time for practical steps,” said Sheikh Asmuddin in the capital.
Pope Francis said he was “deeply saddened” by the attack, joining a chorus of international condemnation.
The Pakistani Taliban faction that claimed the attack, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), was formed in 2014.
It also claimed responsibility for Pakistan’s deadliest blast so far this year – the Lahore Easter bombing, which killed 75.
The US State Department last week designated JuA a terrorist group, calling it “a splinter group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)”.
Hours after the JuA announcement the Islamic State group also claimed the attack.
The Middle Eastern jihadists have struggled in Pakistan due to competition from well established extremist groups such as the Taliban.
Attacks claimed by IS in Pakistan are rare, the most significant being a 2015 bus assault in Karachi that killed 47 people.
The group has made some inroads in Afghanistan, where it has carried out attacks in the east near the border with Pakistan in a tussle for supremacy with the Afghan Taliban.
Last month IS said it carried out twin suicide bombings that left 80 people dead in Kabul, the deadliest attack in the city since 2001.
But officials denied that was a turning point for the group, saying it is under heavy pressure in its eastern strongholds from US airstrikes and an Afghan ground offensive.
Senior analyst Rahimullah Yousafzai cast doubt on both claims to the Quetta bombing, saying there was little previous evidence of either JuA or IS being active in Balochistan province.
But he added that suicide bombers can strike anywhere, so “we cannot rule it out”.
The claims may not be competing at all, he added, suggesting the possibility of a joint attack.“Nothing is concrete.”
The security situation in Balochistan is already murky and confused.
The province, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, has major oil and gas resources but is afflicted by Islamist militancy, sectarian violence and a separatist insurgency.
It is also the site of China’s ambitious $46bn infrastructure project linking its western province of Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea via Pakistan.
Pakistan’s army said Monday that the Quetta attack was “specially targeting” the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
The project has been hit by numerous separatist attacks in the past but China has said it is confident the Pakistani military is in control.
The army has repeatedly been accused by international rights groups of abuses in Balochistan.