ISLAMABAD (AFP) — Thousands of Shiite Muslims held peaceful Ashura processions amid tight security across Pakistan Thursday, commemorating the death of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson Imam Hussein.
The Shiite rallies have in the past led to sectarian violence, but officials said that so far no incidents had been reported.
Police and paramilitary soldiers escorted the minority Shiite community's parades in several major cities, and commandos were perched on some rooftops along the routes in a bid to prevent violence.
The authorities Wednesday placed under curfew the northwestern town of Hangu, where 40 people were killed in an Ashura attack in 2007 and 12 people were wounded in a mortar attack outside a Shiite mosque last year.
Shiite Muslims stage religious processions on Ashura to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein at Karbala in modern-day Iraq in 680 AD.
The mourners recited elegies, carried black banners and marched behind replicas of Imam Hussein's tomb in Iraq, with some beating their chests and whipping their backs with flails in a bloody display of devotion.
Shiites set out late Wednesday from Islamabad to join a large gathering in the capital's twin city, Rawalpindi, which was to end at a Shiite mosque in the garrison town late in the evening.
A similar procession in the eastern city of Lahore was to end at a mosque in the old part of the city late Thursday.
Other major Ashura events were held in the southern port city of Karachi and parts of central Punjab province, southwestern Baluchistan and North West Frontier Province, which is reeling from a wave of Taliban-linked violence.
Shiites make up about 20 percent of Pakistan's Sunni-dominated population of 160 million people.
Clashes between Sunni and Shiite militants in Pakistan have claimed thousands of lives over past decades.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
