Bomb Kills 24 Near Shi`ite Mosque In Pakistan

`According to initial information six people were killed and about 20 were wounded,` Ejaz Bokhari, a city police official said.

Around 24 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in a suspected suicide bombing near a Shi'ite mosque in central Pakistan on Thursday, police said.

The attack in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan was the latest to rock the country, grappling with a growing wave of violence by militants linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest.

The suspected bomber detonated the explosives when a religious procession of Shi'ites was passing the mosque.

"The latest count shows that 24 people are dead," district police chief Chaudhry Maqsood Ahmed told Reuters.

Jawed Mehmood Bhatti, district government official, earlier said the victims included four children and two women.

"According to eyewitnesses, nothing was thrown from outside. It looks as if someone was standing at the site of the blast and waiting for the procession and he blew himself up as the procession came close to him," Bhatti added.

Witnesses said the powerful blast caused damage to the mosque and nearby buildings.

Shi'ites are marking their annual 40-day period of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, who was killed in a 7th century battle in the Iraqi city of Kerbala.

Shi'ites take part in processions on the streets and beat their chests to mourn Hussein's death. Radical Sunnis deem such rituals to be un-Islamic.

Shi'ites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's 160 million population, which is mainly Sunni.

The two Muslim sects generally live at peace with each other but thousands of people have been killed in tit-for-tat killings and bomb attacks by militant groups over the past two decades.

A wave of bomb and suicide attacks has fuelled fears for stability in the nuclear-armed country which is a major partner in the U.S.-led war on al Qaeda and Taliban militants entrenched mainly in the northwest on the Afghan border.

On Thursday, six soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb hit a military convoy in Mohmand tribal region on the Afghan border.