Suicide bomber kills at least 28 in Pakistan

The attack, targeting the funeral procession for a Shiite leader in the town of Dera Ismail Khan, triggered an hours-long riot that the army had to be called in to quell. The town was placed under curfew after shops, homes and cars were torched by furious crowds.

Several of the most lethal bombings of recent months have arisen from sectarian strife, rather than the more typical pattern of attacks by Islamic militants against government and military installations.

Many analysts believe Pakistan's Taliban movement is fomenting sectarian violence as a means of sowing chaos and further destabilizing Pakistan's shaky central government.

Dera Ismail Khan, the site of Friday's attack, is close to the border of the South Waziristan tribal agency, where both Al Qaeda and the Taliban have well-established footholds.

Targeting funerals is in keeping with a grim tactic that has taken hold here in recent months. Memorial services are one of the few occasions on which people are still willing to gather in large numbers in public, and they provide attackers another opportunity to kill and injure those affiliated with the initial victim.

More than 1,000 people turned out to pay respects to Shiite leader Sher Zaman, who had been shot to death by unknown assailants a day earlier. Mourners were massed together, walking slowly toward the graveyard, when the bomber struck.

Hours later, pools of blood and heaps of shredded clothing could still be seen in the street.

Rioting that broke out in the wake of the bombing left two Sunni Muslims dead, according to local news reports, raising fears of more reprisal killings. Some angry mourners fired weapons at police who rushed to the scene of the attack.

Suicide bombings in Pakistan killed more than 1,200 people last year, but sectarian attacks have lately been claiming a disproportionately large toll.

A massive car bomb near a Shiite mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar killed about 30 people in December, and earlier this month, another mosque bombing outside the central town of Multan killed 24 people.

Underscoring the growing sense of insecurity, abductions have also been on the rise, some of them targeting foreigners.

Today, the United Nations made a new appeal for the release of John Solecki, an American U.N. official seized earlier this month in the southern city of Quetta.

Although Quetta is used as a staging ground by Afghan Taliban, the group that claims to be holding Solecki says it is fighting for the cause of independence for Baluchistan, the impoverished province of which Quetta is the capital.

Solecki's kidnappers have threatened to kill him unless several demands relating to Baluchistan, including prisoner releases and an independence resolution, are met by the central government.

Laura.King@latimes.com

Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali contributed to this report from Peshawar.