At least 45 people were killed and 150 injured. The number of deaths will likely rise because half of them are injured in critical condition. "
Karachi (Reuters)-a powerful car bomb Blast in an area with a population of Shiites in Karachi, Pakistan, killed at least 45 people, officials said Sunday.
The blast destroyed the front of the two five-story apartment blocks in the area of Abbas in Karachi, which makes one of the block was on fire and trapping residents under the rubble of the building.
"At least 45 people were killed and 150 injured. The number of deaths will likely rise because half of them are injured in critical condition, "said Hashim Raza Zaidi, a high government official in Karachi, told AFP.
Hundreds of shops and houses were badly damaged in the blast, which occurred as Shiite Muslims were leaving the mosques nearby, and the balcony of the apartment blocks that crumbled.
At the hospital, where many victims Patel injuries treated, a mother crying while looking for her son.
"He stood on the balcony, where he is?" cried the woman.
Ijaz Ali is on the third floor of one of the apartment blocks it with his wife and his two sons when the bomb exploded.
"All of a sudden I heard a big explosion and we thought the building was going to collapse--like an earthquake," he told AFP from the hospital.
"The Windows of my apartment blew up toward me, something hit my head and I fainted. I open my eyes in the hospital and relieved my family survived, "he said.
The majority Shia population was Abbot, but officials said that the victims in the blast that also includes Sunni residents.
Violence against Shiite residents and reached a record in 2012 more than 400 Shiites killed in sectarian attacks.
Monday, a bomb blast in a Sufi shrines killed at least two people and injuring 10 others in the tomb of Shah Ghulam Lakhi in the South District Shikarpur, about 400 kilometers northeast of Karachi. It was also sacred place usually visited by the Shia.
Shia Muslims, which reached about 20 percent of Pakistan's population of 180 million people which is majority Sunni, often assailed by a hard-line Sunni group.
On 16 February in Quetta bomb attack killed 88 people, and 92 people were killed in an attack in a place of pool Hazara on 10 January. The Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) claimed responsibility for attacks on the Shia Hazara residents.
Karachi, a city with a population of 18 million people which is the business center of Pakistan, is routinely hit by violence.
The year 2012 is the deadliest in Karachi in the past two decades, where about 2,000 people were killed in violence related to ethnic and political tension, which raises concerns about the elections that will take place this year.
Pakistan hit by bomb attacks and suicide shooting that killed more than 5200 people since government troops stormed a mosque into a militant hideout in Islamabad in July 2007.
Sectarian violence has increased since the Sunni guerrillas deepens ties with militants of Al Qaida and the Taliban after Pakistan joined the US-led operations to quell militancy after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States. (M014)
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