Suspects Accused In Pakistani Attack

Police arrested dozens of Sunni Muslim militants Tuesday in connection with the slaughter of 16 Shiite Muslims who were praying in a mosque in eastern Pakistan.

Soldiers and police were deployed by the hundreds throughout Punjab province as mourners prepared to bury the victims of Monday's attack.

Four gunmen drove into a Shiite Muslim mosque compound in Quereshi More, where they shot and killed worshippers completing their morning prayers, authorities said. Twenty-five people were hurt, several of them seriously, in the village 13 miles from Multan.

The youngest victim was a 12-year-old boy.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. But police said they feared it was part of the relentless violence between rival Shiite and Sunni Muslim sects that has killed hundreds of people in Pakistan, mostly in Punjab province.

Monday's attack in the village of Quereshi More, 180 miles south of the eastern Punjab provincial capital of Lahore, occurred as 100 Shiite worshippers were finishing morning prayers that marked the beginning of their day-long fast.

Devout Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the holy month of Ramadan.

The attackers, who were riding motorcycles, sprayed the mosque with bullets as they sped past, eyewitnesses said. There were apparently as many as four motorcycles, with two men on each motorcycle, they said.

"I heard the firing and then I heard people on the loudspeaker saying 'help me.' They were the wounded," said Ahsan Karim Shah, owner of a nearby hotel.

Eyewitnesses recounted emotional scenes of neighbors rushing to the mosque, grabbing small children and old men, cradling the dead and comforting the wounded.

"Blood was splattered all over the floor of the mosque," said a shaken Ehsan Karim, who runs a nearby restaurant. "The wounded and the dead all seemed to be piled on each other."

People struggled to transport the injured to the hospital, which is about 12 miles away. Hundreds of people gathered to donate blood.

The attack came one day after an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at a bridge near his private residence in a town outside Lahore. The blast killed four people and ripped apart the bridge Sharif was supposed to have crossed, but he and his family were still at home because of a delay.

Police blamed the ethnic Muttahida Qami Movement for the attack on the bridge. There was no evidence the mosque killings were connected to assassination plot.

In the last year, scores of people have been massacred in attacks between rival Shiite and Sunni sects.

The main combatants have been members of the Sunni Muslim militant group Sipah-e-Sahabah or Guardians of the Friends of the Prophet, and the Shiite Muslim organization known as the Tehrik-e-Jaffria or Group for Shiite Muslim Law.

The dispute between Sunni and Shiite Muslims dates bac to the seventh century death of Islam's prophet Mohammed and a dispute over the rightful heir to the leadership of the Islamic world.

Most of Pakistan's 140 million people are Sunni Muslims, who get along with their Shiite brethren. However, militant groups from both sects have sprung up and they routinely attack each other.

Written by Kathy Gannon