Fox News reports. (H/T Letitia)
Excerpt:
A pair of suicide bombers detonated their explosives outside a historic church in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday, killing 75 people in the deadliest-ever attack on the country’s Christian minority, officials said.
[…]The attack on the All Saints Church, which also wounded 110 people, underlines the threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban at a time when the government is seeking a peace deal with the militants. It will likely intensify criticism from those who believe that negotiating peace with the Taliban is a mistake.
The attack occurred as hundreds of worshippers were coming out of the church in the city’s Kohati Gate district after services to get a free meal of rice offered on the front lawn, said a top government administrator, Sahibzada Anees.
“There were blasts and there was hell for all of us,” said Nazir John, who was at the church with at least 400 other worshippers. “When I got my senses back, I found nothing but smoke, dust, blood and screaming people. I saw severed body parts and blood all around.”
Survivors wailed and hugged each other in the wake of the blasts. The white walls of the church, which first opened in the late 1800s, were pockmarked with holes caused by ball bearings or other metal objects contained in the bombs to cause maximum damage. Blood stained the floor and was splashed on the walls. Plates filled with rice were scattered across the ground.
The attack was carried out by a pair of suicide bombers who detonated their explosives almost simultaneously, said police officer Shafqat Malik. Authorities found their body parts and were trying to determine their age, he said.
The blasts killed 75 people and wounded another 110, said Jamil Shah, a spokesman at the hospital in Peshawar where the victims were being treated. The dead included women and children, said Sher Ali Khan, another doctor at the hospital.
The number of casualties from the blasts was so high that the hospital was running out of caskets for the dead and beds for the wounded, said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, a former information minister of surrounding Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province who was on the scene.
“This is the deadliest attack against Christians in our country,” said Irfan Jamil, the bishop of the eastern city of Lahore.
One of the wounded, John Tariq, who lost his father in the attack, asked of the attackers, “What have we done wrong to these people? Why are we being killed?”
Ahmad Marwat, who identified himself as the spokesman for the Jundullah wing of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Strangely, the terrorist group claims that they attacked civilians because of U.S. drone attacks against other terrorists. Let me make sense of this for you. When a person targets innocent people directly, that’s terrorism. Insofar as Muslims carry out attacks that target civilians, they are terrorists. The United States never targets civilians. Civilians may be killed because they are near to terrorists, or because terrorists use civilians as human shields. There is no moral equivalency here, regardless of what the mainstream media tries to make people believe.
UPDATE: There was also a massive terrorist attack in Kenya on the weekend.
WINTERY KNIGHT 