November 11, 2009

Source:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead a Pakistani spokesman for the Iranian consulate in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Thursday as he was on his way to work, police said.

Attackers targeted Abu Al-Hasan Jaffry, director of public relations and protocol at the consulate in Peshawar, as he left for the office in his car, senior police official Nisar Marwat told AFP.

He died on the way to hospital, Marwat said. The motive for the killing was not immediately clear.

Jaffry was shot on a main road soon after leaving his home in the Gulberg neighbourhood of Peshawar, a witness said.

“Suddenly the firing started and when I reached the main road, I saw Jaffry bleeding with wounds and the attackers, probably more than two, had fled,” a man, who declined to give his name, told AFP.

“Jaffry had been hit in the head and chest and his left arm was badly injured,” he added.

A post-mortem examination was in progress at Peshawar’s Combined Military Hospital, a police official said. A government official in Peshawar confirmed the killing.

Relations between Iran and Pakistan are close, but tensions rose last month when Tehran blamed Pakistan-based militants for a suicide attack that killed 42 people, including 15 members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard.

Islamabad has strongly denied that the militant group Jundallah launched the October 18 attack from its territory.

Peshawar runs into Pakistan’s tribal badlands on the Afghan border, which US officials call the most dangerous place on earth because of sanctuaries for Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants allegedly plotting attacks on the West.

The northwestern metropolis of 2.5 million people has been hit by a wave of suicide bombings and gun attacks but sectarian violence is rare in the city.

Shiites, who are a majority in Iran, account for about 20 percent of Pakistan’s mostly Sunni Muslim population of 167 million. More than 4,000 people have died in flashes of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the 1980s.