Bomb rips through Pakistani fruit market, killing 20

At least 20 people were killed and more than 48 wounded on Friday by a powerful suicide blast apparently targeting the Shia Hazara ethnic minority at a crowded fruit market in Pakistan's Quetta city, Agence France-Presse reported, citing local officials.

Body parts littered the scene and injured people screamed for help as black smoke cloaked the market after the explosion.

A faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed the attack, which occurred in the capital of southwestern Balochistan province - which borders Afghanistan and Iran - is Pakistan's largest and poorest province.

Balochistan Home Minister Zia Ullah Langu gave the toll and confirmed it was a suicide blast, adding that two of the dead were children.

Provincial police chief Mohsin Butt said eight Hazara were among the victims. Four paramilitary troops, who were guarding the open-air fruit and vegetable market, were among the wounded, The Associated Press reported.

The Hazara, whose Central Asian features make them easily recognizable, are a soft target for Taliban and Islamic State militants and other Sunni Muslim militant groups, who consider them heretics. They have been heavily targeted in Afghanistan in attacks claimed by an affiliate of the IS group, Reuters reported.

They are so frequently targeted that they are forced to live in two protected enclaves in the city and are given a daily police escort to the market to stock up on supplies.

Police chief Butt said the same had happened on Friday.

The bomb hidden between bags of potatoes was detonated near a site where produce was being loaded for distribution around the market.

"I was loading a small truck and I heard a huge bang and it seemed as if the earth beneath me had shaken and I fell down," said Irfan Khan, a laborer, from his hospital bed.

"The atmosphere was filled with black smoke and I could not see anything, I could hear people screaming for help and I was also screaming for help."

He said the air was "filled with the stinging smell of burned human flesh".

Hazara make up around 500,000 of the city's 2.3 million people.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and President Arif Alvi issued statements condemning the attack and adding that it would not weaken "the resolve of the nation in the fight against terrorism".

Violence in Pakistan has dropped significantly since the country's deadliest militant attack, an assault on a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar in 2014 that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

(China Daily 04/13/2019 page8)