Newsroom24x7 Staff

Quetta (Pakistan): At least 93 people were killed, dozens of them lawyers, and over 100 others injured today when a Taliban suicide bomber struck mourners at a hospital here.

The bomber struck at the government-run Civil Hospital in Quetta where the body of prominent lawyer and president of Balochistan Bar Association Bilal Anwar Kasi, who was shot dead earlier in the day, was being brought.

Today’s terrorist attack in Quetta is being seen as a dastardly attack by the Pakistani Taliban which is deeply entrenched in Eastern Afghanistan and has started spreading its activities in sparsely populated areas of Balochistan.

The Pakistani Taliban, according to observers, has forged close links with the ISIS, which is a Salafi jihadist militant group that follows a fundamentalist, Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam. The Quetta attack appears to be part of a larger strategy of the the ISIS-Pak Taliban nexus to consolidate their base in the trouble-torn Balochistan province, where the freedom movement has also started gaining strength in recent times. The terrorist groups also appear ready to strike targets in Iran, where 80 per cent of the population is Shia. The spread of terrorist violence in Balochistan will also put a question mark on the security environment in the region along the Arabian Sea where China is all geared to invest heavily.