A suicide bombing, on Friday, at an election rally in the Southwestern region of Pakistan killed 128 people and left more than 150 people wounded. This marked the third election related violence in the same week.
This was one of the most deadly attacks faced by Pakistan in the last 3 years. According to the senior police official Qaim Lashari, more than 1000 people were present at the rally in Mastung, the violence prone area of Balochistan.
The province bordering Iran and Afghanistan has been the operating centre for Islamist militants associated with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State (I. S.). It is also the province where an indigenous ethnic Baloch insurgency is fighting against the Central Government of Pakistan.
The Islamic State (I. S.) has solicited their engagement with the attack. However, the group hasn’t provided any evidence.
The blast, among other people, killed the provincial assembly candidate Siraj Raisani. He is the second electoral candidate to be killed in pre-election violence this week.
Earlier on Friday, another bomb blast in the northern town of Bannu was aimed at the campaign convoy of Akram Khan Durrani who was a member of the religious Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal Party (M. M. A.) and ally of Sharif’s party.
Previously, on Tuesday, a rally by an anti-Taliban political party in Peshawar was bombed by a suicide bomber killing 20 people including the provincial assembly candidate Haroon Bilour. The Pakistani Taliban affirmed responsibility for the attack.
Bilour was a member of the Awami National Party (A. N. P.), a secular and ethnic outfit of Pashtun nationalists. His father, Bashir Bilour, a senior A. N. P. leader was also killed in a similar manner in 2012 before the elections in Pakistan.
