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Mufti Amanullah: Murdered cleric buried in Rawalpindi | |
(about 5 hours later) | |
A hardline Sunni prayer leader has been buried in the city of Rawalpindi in Pakistan a day after he was shot dead. | |
Mufti Amanullah was a leader of the hardline group Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat. | |
Some 4,000 Sunni activists, madrassa students and sympathisers attended the funeral before dispersing peacefully. | |
Mufti Amanullah was going to a seminary in the Raja Bazar area on Sunday when he was shot by at least four gunmen on two motorbikes. No group has said it carried out the attack. | |
At least one person was killed when violence erupted in the aftermath of the shooting. | |
Local police told the BBC that the man died when protesters, including students from the seminary, burned down a Shia mosque and some shops next to it. | |
Security was tightened across the city ahead of the funeral - but the BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Rawalpindi says most markets had reopened by Monday afternoon. | |
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) used to be known as Sipah-e-Sahaba, an extremist organisation whose goal was to convert Pakistan into a "pure" Sunni state and which was outlawed in 2002. | |
Maulana Ludhianvi, the Sipah-e-Sahaba leader, addressed mourners at the funeral and accused "those sitting in a container on Constitution Avenue" as being responsible for ASWJ deaths in Rawalpindi. | |
A Shia alliance, Wahdatul Muslimeen, is allied with anti-government leader Tahirul Qadri's PAT movement in the continuing sit-in in Islamabad. | |
Thousands of Shias and hundreds of Sunnis have been killed since sectarian violence - carried out by hardliners from both groups - first emerged in Pakistan in the early 1990s. | Thousands of Shias and hundreds of Sunnis have been killed since sectarian violence - carried out by hardliners from both groups - first emerged in Pakistan in the early 1990s. |
Clashes erupted in Rawalpindi last year when a Shia procession marking the religious festival of Ashura coincided with a sermon at a Sunni mosque affiliated with the seminary. Ten people were left dead in the violence that followed. | |
On Thursday the dean of the faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Karachi, Dr Shakeel Auj, was shot dead but it is as yet unclear if that was a sectarian killing. | On Thursday the dean of the faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Karachi, Dr Shakeel Auj, was shot dead but it is as yet unclear if that was a sectarian killing. |
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