Eight worshippers including two children were killed in twin bomb blasts Thursday at a packed Sufi shrine in Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi, officials said.
Senior police official Hamid Parhial gave the toll, adding that 65 people were also injured, and said it was a suspected suicide attack.
The bombs exploded at the entrance of the shrine to Sufi saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi as devotees packed it for a weekly gathering in Karachi’s seaside Clifton district.
Provincial home minister Zulfikar Mirza said an investigation into the attack was already underway and that the government had decided to seal all shrines in the city immediately over security fears.
"It was a terrorist attack," he said.
The shrine’s floor was spattered in blood, said witnesses. Slippers, sandals and flowers brought by devotees to lay at the tomb littered the area.
Ambulances with sirens blaring were seen ferrying casualties to hospitals as police and paramilitary soldiers cordoned off the shrine.
Doctor Seemin Jamali of Civil Hospital Karachi said 10 women and seven children with serious injuries were among those admitted.
There was no claim of responsibility for the latest attack but the Pakistani Taliban has been blamed for similar bombings in the past.
More than 3,700 people have been killed in a series of suicide attacks and bomb explosions, many of them carried out by the Taliban and other al-Qaeda-linked extremists, in Pakistan during the last three years.
The shrine had received threats in the past and had been previously closed for security reasons after a bomb attack in July at a popular Sufi site in Lahore left more than 40 people dead.
Militants see visits to Sufi shrines and some rituals as un-Islamic and Punjab province’s law minister, Rana Sanaullah Khan told Express television: "Taliban have no respect for Sufi shrines that is why they target these places."
Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani "strongly condemned" the latest blasts in a statement and ordered an immediate inquiry into the incident.
"It is yet another heinous act of violence reflecting the deranged minds of terrorists," said Gilani, according to the statement issued by his office.
The attack came as the country struggles to deal with massive flooding that has killed nearly 1,800 people and left millions reliant on aid handouts.