Authorities arrest suspect in connection with Quetta attacks

Pakistani authorities have arrested a man suspected of being involved in a deadly attack on Tuesday on a religious procession in the city of Quetta, capital of the south-western province of Baluchistan which borders Afghanistan, according to the country's information minister. "We have arrested the people... one man," Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the information minister, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "We don't want to announce it, but we have arrested one [alleged] culprit," he added, refusing to go into details about the man's identity or which organisation the suspect might belong to. At least 44 people were killed and over 150 injured when suspected Sunni Muslim radicals attacked a religious Shi'ite procession mourning the martyrdom of Prophet Muhammad's grandson, held to be one of the most important figures in Shi'ite history. The three attackers wielded automatic weapons and hurled grenades before blowing themselves up amidst the crowd. It was the worst sectarian attack in Pakistan since 57 people were killed in a suicide attack on a Shi'ite mosque in Quetta last July. In retaliation, angry Shi'ite mobs rampaged through the city of 1.2 million, setting fire to shops and attacking a cinema and a bank. The local administration immediately announced a curfew and witnesses reported seeing snipers positioned on roof-tops as army trucks with machine-guns were reported to be patrolling the roads. "The city remains under curfew," Ahmed said. The minister did not discount the possibility that Tuesday's attacks might have been coordinated to coincide with the suicide bomb blasts in Iraqi shrines that claimed over 150 lives and injured close to 450 people on the same day. "Let's see... it's not final as yet," Ahmed said, agreeing with a query on whether investigators were looking into that possibility. The Pakistani government had ordered a judicial inquiry into the attacks, Ahmed said. In another incident, more sectarian clashes were reported from the rural area of Mandi Bahauddin in the eastern province of Punjab where Shi'ite and Sunni mobs confronted each other after a local Shi'ite leader was reportedly shot dead by a Sunni mob. And a stampede in another procession in a remote tribal region in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) was reported to have killed at least eight women and five children. The stampede is thought to have been triggered off by a power cut which nervous locals thought was another attack.