Wave of Slayings in Pakistan Tied to Religious, Ethnic Divisions

At least 11 people were killed Monday in apparent Muslim sectarian and ethnic shootings in Pakistan’s central province of Punjab and the port city Karachi, government officials said.

Gunmen sprayed bullets in a bazaar in the central Punjab town of Shorkot, killing at least seven people from the minority Shiite sect and one from the majority Sunni sect, a government official in the area said.

A Sunni lawyer and a Sunni banker were killed by gunmen in the provincial capital, Lahore, police said.

In Karachi, unidentified gunmen killed a senior police officer as a small ethnic party held protests for the second day running against the arrest of their workers, police said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the Punjab shootings, but police said they seemed to be the latest in a wave of tit-for-tat attacks, which militant Sunni and Shiite groups blame on each other.

The Karachi killing, which police blamed on “miscreants,” followed the death of four people, including a 3-year-old child, Sunday in a renewed spate of violence in the city.

Earlier, Shiite sources in Islamabad put the death toll in Shorkot at nine, saying all the victims were Shiites.

Sectarian violence is rife in Punjab, with militant Sunni and Shiite factions engaged in a feud that officials say has killed more than 100 people this year, including religious scholars, lawyers and doctors.

More than 225 people have been killed in political violence in Karachi since March 1.