Quetta, Pakistan // Pakistan’s lawyers boycotted courts and staged protests nationwide Tuesday after a horrific suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital that killed 70 people including many of their colleagues.
Monday’s bloodletting, with medics battling to save scores of injured amid scenes of carnage, left the southwestern city reeling.
Streets were largely empty in the city on Tuesday as most public transport shut down, with markets and schools closed in mourning. Police stood guard at the site of the blast at the Civil Hospital.
The explosion came as some 200 lawyers along with journalists gathered there after the fatal shooting of a top provincial lawyer.
The attack has been claimed by both a Pakistani Taliban faction called Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), and ISIL.
Neither claim has been verified by Pakistani authorities. If ISIL were behind the attack it would be their deadliest so far in Pakistan, where the group has struggled for purchase.
The Pakistan Bar Council said in a statement before the stoppage on Tuesday that lawyers “throughout the country” would take part. Demonstrations were being held in major cities including Islamabad, Karachi and Quetta.
Funerals have already been held for many of the victims. Officials have put the number of wounded at 112.
JuA, formed in 2014, also claimed responsibility for Pakistan's deadliest blast so far this year – the Lahore Easter bombing, which killed 75 – among other attacks.
The US State Department last week designated JuA a terrorist group, calling it “a splinter group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region”.
Hours after the JuA claim ISIL also claimed the attack and said it had killed 200 people, according to ISIL-linked Amaq news agency. The figure is believed to be exaggerated.
Agence France-Presse
