Karachi, December 5
A bomb ripped through Macedonia’s consulate in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi today and three bodies were pulled from the rubble, the police said.It added that at the time of the blast no one was in the single-storey villa in the Defence Housing Authority neighbourhood. One of the victims was a security guard who appeared to have been killed before the explosion.
“It appears he was murdered,” said Mr Rao Zaheer, a policeman at the scene. “He had stab wounds to his neck.”
The two other bodies, one a middle-aged woman, had not yet been identified, he said.
“They too were killed before the explosion. The bodies have been sent for autopsy.”
No group has claimed responsibility for the blast which is being described by the authorities as an act of terrorism.
A crane was at the scene lifting debris and rescue workers and the police scoured the rubble for clues hours after the incident.
“It’s certainly an act of terrorism, but we have no details about what kind of group was involved,” Mr Zaheer said. The police has started its investigations but has made no arrests.”
An official from the Macedonian Foreign Ministry in Skopje said there were no Macedonian citizens employed at the consulate. A Pakistani businessman Bilal Qureshi was appointed honorary consul there.
“We didn’t know about any threat made to our consulate, or what might be the motive for such an attack. For now we are relying on the investigation of the Pakistani police,” the official said.
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said the authorities had heightened security in Karachi and the rest of the southern Sindh province of which Karachi was capital.
“Also we are keeping a strict eye on security arrangements in the rest of the country. After what happened in Karachi, we have to be vigilant,” he said.
In recent months suspected Islamic extremists have carried out a series of attacks in major Pakistani cities, targeting Westerners, religious minorities and government officials.
A senior police official, who requested anonymity, said investigators had not ruled out the possible involvement of shadowy Islamic extremist groups in the blast.
Mr Hayat said authorities were also probing the possibility that this was a “revenge” attack — retribution for the death of six Pakistanis killed in an ambush in Macedonia in March which the police called a pre-emptive raid on “Muslim terrorists”.
Reuters
