Jihad in Pakistan

Scores killed in suicide blast aimed at Christians in Lahore children's park

Pakistani Taliban faction Jamaat ul-Ahrar says Christians were target of bomb that killed 72 and injuring 280 in park thronged with families.

A bodycount more than twice that in Brussels.

Reportedly, most of them are Christians though some Muslims are among the dead and injured.

Reportedly, perhaps half the dead are children.

Lahore bombing is faction's boldest bid to stake claim as Pakistan's most violent terrorists

The bombing of Lahore’s most popular park is the bloodiest attempt yet by a new Islamic extremist faction to establish itself as the most aggressive and violent of the many such groups active in Pakistan.

The target was the country’s long-beleaguered Christian community, according to a credible claim of responsibility from Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a group founded about two years ago after a split within the fragmented movement known as the Pakistan Taliban.

However, many Muslims were among the scores of victims when a suicide bomber detonated a nail-filled device near a children’s playground. This is unlikely to bother the perpetrators.

Extremist clerics have made sustained efforts to find theological justification for such casualties in recent decades and, though such arguments are contested by mainstream scholars, they are preached in hardline mosques and taught in many religious schools in Pakistan.

The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, like the broader Pakistan Taliban, follow an extremist branch of the rigorously conservative Deobandi strand of Islam which, along with equally intolerant schools of practice influenced by those in the Gulf, has made major inroads in Pakistan in recent years at the expense of more open-minded local traditions.

The group, based in a restive zone along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan, has been responsible for a string of attacks, often on government workers or religious minorities, and has explicitly said it is at war against an “unbeliever state”.

Pakistan hunts those behind attack that killed more than 70 in Lahore

Lahore attack: Christian leaders express horror at massacre

Pakistan is sixth on the list of countries in which Christians are most at risk, compiled by Open Doors, a Christian organisation that monitors global persecution. 

The top five are North Korea, Iraq, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Syria.