Pakistan Sufi shrine rocked by two suicide blasts
The death toll from two suicide bomb attacks outside a Sufi shrine in the central Pakistani province of Punjab on Sunday reached 41, Security sources from the scene of the blasts said.
"These were suicide bombings and we arrested an attacker who could not completely detonate the explosives on his body. He was wounded," Zahid Ali, a police officer in Dera Ghazi Khan city where the blasts took place, told Reuters by telephone.
Al-Qaeda-linked Taliban militants abhor the unorthodox Sufi interpretation of Islam and have attacked Sufi targets in Pakistan several times.
Many of those wounded in the attack were in a serious condition, he said, and the injured have been taken to the Dera Ghazi Khan hospital for treatment.
Hundreds of worshippers had gathered at the shrine for a religious ceremony when the attacks took place.
Sufi worshippers, who follow a mystical strain of Islam, have increasingly been the target of bloody attacks by Islamist militants in Pakistan.
No group has immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Sunni extremists, including the Taliban, are vehemently opposed to the Sufi strand of Islam and consider their shrines to be idolatrous.
A bomb blast outside the popular shrine of the 12th century saint, Baba Farid, also known as Ganjshakar in the Punjab town of Pakpattan, killed four people, including women, in October last year.
The Pakpattan site is the second most popular Sufi shrine after the Data Darbar shrine in the eastern city of Lahore, where two suicide bombers blew themselves up among crowds of worshippers in July last year, killing 42 people.
On October 7, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a Sufi shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi in Karachi, killing nine worshippers, including two children.
More than 4,150 people have been killed in suicide attacks and bomb explosions, blamed on homegrown Taliban and other Islamist extremist networks, since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.