At least 14 people were killed today and several others wounded in the Pakistani Balochistan capital of Quetta, when gunmen halted a busload of Shi’ites from Akhtarabad headed to work in a vegetable market.
The gunmen halted the bus, forced the passengers out and then opened fire into the crowd. Witnesses say they allowed all the non-Shi’ites to leave before they started shooting, suggesting it was another sectarian attack.
It is the second such attack in the past few weeks, as another group of gunmen attacked a busload of Shi’ite pilgrims just outside of Quetta in late September, killing 29 of them.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani condemned the killings and vowed that the killers would be brought to justice. The pledges would likely have meant more if such killings had not repeatedly happened unpunished.