Pakistan city mourns after twin bomb attacks

Mourners beat their chests and cried out as the bodies of 14 victims were brought to a sports field following Friday's attacks.

Thousands of people attended a funeral in Karachi on Saturday for some of those who died in bomb attacks on a bus and then a hospital where casualties were being treated, as the toll reached 33.

Mourners beat their chests and cried out as the bodies of 14 victims were brought to a sports field following Friday's attacks.

Live television footage showed men and women clad in black and carrying black flags beating their chests and chanting religious slogans.

"More than 10,000 people attended the funeral of the 14 deceased," Javed Mehr, a local police official at the ground, told AFP.

"The entire area was sealed off by police and paramilitary rangers to avoid any untoward incident."

Funerals were also held for five members of a Pakistani Christian family killed in the hospital blast, four of them women.

Karachi's roads were mostly deserted, while shops, business centres and educational institutions were closed as the port city mourned.

Police said the bombs were planted on parked motorcycles and detonated by remote control, rather than being suicide attacks.

In the first bombing a device planted on a motorcycle went off near a bus carrying people to a procession marking the last day of the Shiite holy month of Muharram.

The second bomb killed 13 people outside the casualty department of the Jinnah Hospital, where victims of the first attack were being treated and anxious relatives were gathering.

"According to our preliminary investigation, both the explosions were triggered by remote control," senior police official Mazhar Mishwani told AFP.

Thirty-three people, including women and children, died as a result of the attacks and 170 others were being treated for injuries, provincial health minister Saghir Ahmad said.

"Six people died overnight while two more succumbed to injuries this morning, raising the death toll to 33," he said in a statement.

Sectarian violence periodically flares between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The latter account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's 167 million people. Such violence has killed more than 4,000 people since the late 1980s.

On December 28, 43 people were killed in a bomb attack on a religious procession marking Ashura, the first day of Muharram.

The province's home affairs minister, Zulfiqar Mirza, said the attackers on Friday would have targeted the procession itself were it not for security measures surrounding it. He said some arrests had been made but declined to give details.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi "condemned the Karachi bombings and said terrorism will never be allowed to succeed in its nefarious designs," a foreign ministry statement said. "Such acts only strengthen our resolve to fight terrorism."

Police and paramilitary rangers patrolled streets and sensitive areas and Mehr said security had been stepped up at hospitals.

At another funeral, hundreds of people mourned seven workers of the Mutahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) killed in political violence that has swept the city in recent weeks.

The MQM is the main coalition partner of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital.

At least 37 activists from rival parties in the local government have been killed over the past five days, following 48 such killings last month.

Pakistan is on the front line of the US war on Al-Qaeda. Militants have killed more than 3,000 people since 2007.

Three soldiers of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) and four passers-by were injured when a remote-controlled bomb exploded in the southwestern city of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, an FC official said.

"The bomb was planted on a motorcycle which exploded when two FC vehicles passed by it on Saturday." FC spokesman Murtaza Baig told reporters.

Hundreds of people have died in oil and gas-rich Baluchistan since late 2004, when rebels rose up demanding political autonomy and a greater share of the profits from natural resources.