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MULTAN, April 26 (AFP)-Unidentified assailants on Wednesday gunned down a leader of a Pakistani Shi’a Muslim party and his clerk, police and party sources confirmed. Farrukh Barjees Tahir, a lawyer and district vice-president of Tehreek Jafria Pakistan (TJP), was attacked in the town of Khanewal in central Punjab province. Local police said that two men riding a motorcycle opened fire with automatic weapons on Tahir as he sat in his car in Khanewal, 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of here, before fleeing the scene. Tahir was killed instantly while his clerk, Mohammad Idrees, died later in hospital. Police suspect a sectarian motive for the attack, said a local administration official, who did not want to be identified. The attack comes three years after Tahir's father, Syed Zahirul Hassan Tirmizi, was shot dead in 1997 in Khanewal, where he was president of the TJP's district branch. Two activists of an Islamic group from the majority Sunni Muslim community were arrested over Tirmizi's murder and they have been on trial at an anti-terrorism court in Multan, police said. On April 11, more than 15 people were killed and 20 injured in an attack on a Shi’a Muslim mosque in a northwestern Pakistani town, Malhowali, in the Attock district in Punjab. The mosque raid was the worst suspected sectarian incident since General Pervez Musharraf seized power after toppling the government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a military coup in October last year. It closely followed the killing of a central TJP leader Wiqar Naqvi, his son and driver by unidentified gunmen in Karachi in southern Sindh province. Around 300 people have died in Pakistan in sectarian violence in recent years, most of them in Punjab, the biggest province of the country. The unrest was blamed on religious movements.
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