LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) – Gunmen opened fire at a Pakistan hospital where victims of attacks on Ahmadi mosques were being treated late Monday, killing 12 people in a shootout with security forces, a doctor said.
The attackers stormed the gate of Jinnah Hospital in the eastern city of Lahore, where at least 30 victims and one of the alleged attackers in Friday’s suicide, gun and grenade attack on the minority sect were being treated.
“They started indiscriminate firing outside the emergency ward and intensive care unit,” Doctor Javed Akram told reporters.
“As a result, 12 people were killed. Most of them were police officials. Some hospital guards and attendants were also killed,” he said.
Akram told reporters that at least 30 wounded Ahmadis had been admitted to the hospital and that one of the alleged attackers of Friday’s devastating attacks was being treated in a private room.
Armoured police vans raced to the scene as shooting continued, the doctor said. The identity of the attackers was not immediately clear.
“The fight is going on. We are tracing the attackers. We will not spare them,” police official Sohail Sukhera said.
The assault came three days after suspected Sunni Muslim militants wearing suicide vests burst into two Ahmadi prayer halls in two neighbourhoods of Lahore and killed 82 worshippers
They were the worst attacks in Pakistan since a suicide bomber killed 101 people on January 1 at a volleyball game in Bannu, which abuts the tribal belt along the Afghan border that Washington calls Al-Qaeda headquarters.
Pakistani police blamed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan militants who trained in Waziristan, part of the lawless tribal badlands on the Afghan border.
Pakistan’s leading rights group said the Ahmadi community had received threats for more than a year and officials blamed the attack on Islamist militants who have killed more than 3,370 people in bombings over the last three years.
A city of eight million people and widely considered Pakistan’s cultural capital, Lahore has increasingly suffered Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked violence, with around 265 people killed in nine attacks since March 2009.
Lahore is a playground for Pakistan’s elite and home to many top brass in its military and intelligence establishment.
Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants have orchestrated the three-year bombing campaign in Pakistan to avenge military operations and the government’s alliance with the United States over the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Founded by Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in 1838, the Ahmadi sect believes that Ahmad himself was a prophet and that Jesus died aged 120 in Srinagar, capital of Indian-ruled Kashmir.
Pakistan declared them non-Muslims in 1974 and 10 years later they were barred from calling themselves Muslims.
Religious violence in Pakistan, mostly between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shiites, has killed more than 4,000 people in the past decade.
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