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Car bomb kills 40 at Pakistan prayer meet

AFP, Multan
A powerful car bomb ripped through a prayer gathering of Sunni Muslim radicals in central Pakistan before dawn yesterday, killing 40 people and wounding more than 100 as the country grappled with a new upsurge of sectarian violence.
The blast at 4:30am (2330 GMT) targeted around 1,000 Sunnis from an outlawed group who had gathered in the city of Multan to mark the first anniversary of the assassination of their leader Azam Tariq.
The suspected sectarian attack comes six days after 30 worshippers from the rival Shia minority were killed by a suicide bomber as they prayed in the eastern city of Sialkot. Police had feared a bloody revenge attack.
It also falls a week ahead of the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, raising fears that a renewed cycle of revenge attacks between the sects could continue
into the tense fasting month.
"It was a high intensity (car) bomb which carried seven to eight kilograms of explosives," city police chief Sikandar Hayat told AFP.
Thursday's carnage brings to six the number of sectarian attacks this year and raises the death toll to 164, one of the highest in two decades of sectarian bloodletting.
The target Thursday was the most radical of Pakistan's hardline Sunni militant organisations, Millat-e-Islamia, the new name for the outlawed Sipah-e-Sahaba led by the late Tariq. The group is accused of killing hundreds of Shias since the 1980s. The explosions triggered a stampede through Multan, an ancient shrine-dotted city on the southern Punjab plains.
The main Rasheedabad Square was littered with body parts, turbans and bloodstains, witnesses said.
Forty people were killed, the chief medical officer of the city's main hospital, Imran Rafiq, told AFP.
More than 100 were injured and extra hospital staff were brought in to extract shrapnel from the wounded.
No one has claimed responsibility but some Sunni leaders immediately blamed Shia extremists.
"This attack is carried out by Shias," Millat-e-Islamia leader Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi told AFP.
"It is outrightly a sectarian killing. This was an echo of the Sialkot tragedy, while the fact is that our party was not involved in the Sialkot incident."
Shia leader Allama Syed Taqi Naqvi denied any hand in the blasts. "It is a terrorist act. No Shia was involved. Those killed were our brothers because they were Muslims."
Police have detained several people for questioning, Hayat told AFP. Hayat said the car bomb was probably set off by remote control or
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The prayer gathering in Rasheedabad Square had lasted the whole night and the crowd was beginning to disperse when the predawn calm was shattered by the explosion.
Multan is known as the "city of saints" for the numerous Sufi Muslim saints buried in glittering blue-tiled shrines, but has long been a hotbed of Islamic extremism.
Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid condemned the attack as "an act of brutal terrorism".
Outside the hospital, victims' relatives chanted slogans against Shias and vowed revenge.
Hundreds of police and paramilitary troops were deployed to guard mosques and religious schools in several cities to prevent follow-up violence.
Ludhianvi called a two-day mourning period for Thursday and Friday.