Peshawar, Sep.18 (ANI): The death toll from a suicide car bomb blast that tore through a bazaar and gutted shops in Ustarzai, a small mainly Shia northwest town which lies between the garrison city of Kohat and Hangu, has risen to 33. Police sources also confirmed injuries to 56 others.
The little known Lashkar-i-Jhangvi al Almi militant group claimed responsibility for the attack.
“There are 33 dead and more than 50 injured. Twenty-five have been identified while the rest are in a very bad condition. The bodies have been completely damaged,” a foreign news agency quoted a North West Frontier Province police spokesman, as saying.
Police and witnesses said that soon after the blast, Shiite youths took control of the bazaar and attacked two police vehicles with sticks and chanted slogans condemning the Taliban and the Pakistani government.
Shias account for about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167 million. More than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence since the late 1980s. (ANI)
ROUNDUP: Prosecutor accuses Hezbollah of plotting attacks in Egypt
Cairo – Egypt’s public prosecutor on Wednesday accused Hezbollah of sending operatives to Egypt to carry out attacks in the country and to smuggle weapons and money to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement released Wednesday evening Abdel-Magid Mohammed accused Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah of dispatching agents to Egypt during Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The militants were to recruit local agents to conduct attacks, to incite the people and the armed forces to revolt, to spy on Egypt and to smuggle weapons and cash to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he said.
The statement added that the prosecutor had received “certain information” from Egypt’s domestic intelligence service, State Security Investigations, that a Hezbollah cell had rented apartments overlooking the Suez Canal in order to spy on traffic through the canal.
It also accused them of spying on resorts in Sinai, and renting rooms in fashionable districts where Hezbollah agents held training workshops on spreading Shiite thought in Egypt.
Hezbollah’s spokesman in Beirut did not answer repeated requests for comment from the German Press Agency dpa on Wednesday evening.
Earlier on Wednesday morning, two sources in the Egyptian Interior Ministry and an Islamist lawyer told dpa that State Security had detained 49 people – including 41 Egyptians, seven Palestinians with Israeli passports, and one Lebanese man – in December on suspicion of smuggling weapons and money to Hamas.
A spokesman from the Israeli Embassy in Cairo told dpa the embassy was working with the Egyptian authorities to find out more information about the detentions.
Montasser al-Zayat, a former member of the Islamist group Gamaa al-Islamiya and a former associate of deputy al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, on Wednesday told dpa that the brother of the Lebanese detainee had asked him to represent the detainees, but that he had not had access to them.
Egypt’s public prosecutor on Wednesday evening said that Egypt’s High State Security prosecutor was interrogating “around 49 suspects,” that the Lawyer’s Syndicate had been duly notified of the men’s detention and that the prosecutor had received no petition from a lawyer seeking access to the detainees.
“Investigations revealed that Nasrallah had dispatched the agents after his speech … and that he had planned to incite the people and military forces to rebel against the regime,” Egypt’s public prosecutor said in the statement, claiming that the arrests had foiled Nasrallah’s plans.
“If the people took to the streets by the millions, could the police kill millions of Egyptians?” Nasrallah asked in a televised address at the beginning of Israel’s offensive in Gaza in December. “People of Egypt, you must open this border by the force of your chests.” (dpa)