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Fayaz Aziz / Reuters
One of those injured in a suicide bomb attack in Pakistan receives treatment Friday.
HANGU, Pakistan — A suicide bomber killed 22 people on Friday in a crowded market outside two mosques in northwest Pakistan, police and hospital officials said.
Two of the dead were policemen.
Forty-eight people were wounded in the attack in a narrow lane in the town of Hangu that houses both a Shiite and a Sunni Muslim mosque.
Officials said the anti-Taliban Sunni Supreme Council often holds its meetings in the Sunni mosque, which made it a possible target.
But district police chief Muhammad Saeed said that the attack was aimed at Shiites and that Sunni Muslims were unintended victims.
"Most of the dead were moving in and out of the mosques in the marketplace after Friday prayers when the bomb went off," senior police officer Imtiaz Shah said.
Hangu, part of Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, has been racked by sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite tribes whose mosques, homes and shops are often close to one another.
Hangu is just a few miles from Parachinar, which has a significant Shiite population against whom hardline Sunni militant groups have launched attacks for years.
No group had claimed responsibility for the attack by late evening.
Related:
Pakistan's unprecedented winter of attacks
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
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The senseless violence, the work of death continues. Irrespective of who really was the intended target. The point of the bomb was simply to kill. To create fear, terror and devastation, simply because one can.For those extremist militants, violence is their bread and butter.Taking others lives, their main course and dying their dessert. Until Pakistan leaders decide to step in, eliminating the extremists, putting an end to these years of fighting, the folks just trying to get through each day, will continue to die. Not everyone is trying to kill everyone else.
Exactly, Windancersong. Pakistan traditions since it's creation in 1947.
Muslim on Muslim violence does not rate as news any more. Let the Pakis take care of the terrorists on their own, since they hate America with a purple passion. There are no terrorist groups that claim to be Muslim who ever stop to pray or hold a worship service. They are simply using Islam as an excuse to hate and kill, and the true Muslims don't have the beard to stand up to them.