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Posted on 10/28/2001 3:48:56 PM PST by Pokey78

FIFTEEN Christian worshippers, including six children, and a Muslim guard were massacred when gunmen opened fire on a Protestant church service in southern Pakistan yesterday in an attack being blamed on Islamic extremists.

Relatives gather in a morgue in Bahawalpur

As the families were finishing morning service at St Dominic's Catholic Church in Bahawalpur, five gunmen drove up on two motorbikes, ran into the church and sprayed the congregation of around 100 with automatic gunfire.

The attack came days after Christian leaders in the northern Punjab town had asked police to provide extra officers as a result of threats to their security. No one has claimed responsibility but a police source said members of a banned Islamic group, Sipah-i-Shabah, were under suspicion.

A Muslim police officer stationed on the door was shot first. Three of the gunmen ran into the church and bolted the door behind them, then without saying a word opened fire.

Screaming women and children tried to run for cover behind the altar and many crawled underneath the pews. Sixteen people, including the pastor, Rev Emmanuel Alladita, died and five were seriously injured in the attack, which lasted several minutes.

The Protestant congregation regularly hired the church from Catholics. Fr Rocas Tatrias, a Catholic priest, was at the parish house preparing to take Mass when he heard the gunfire.

"I came out of the house and saw one gunman at the front door. He had shot the policeman," said Fr Tatrias. "Another one was at the back gate of the church. All I heard was screaming and gunfire. I grabbed some children who were outside with me and we jumped over the wall to protect ourselves.

"No one could get out of the church, they had bolted the door. I just lay by the wall holding the children, listening to the shots." The priest said the men fled the church with their weapons trained on the people outside, then jumped on the motorbikes and sped away.

The priest ran into the church. "There was blood all over the church, over the altar where people had tried to hide, bodies lying on the ground, people crying and screaming. The church walls were peppered with gunfire. It was a terrible, shocking scene."

Shamoon Masih, 34, who was shot in the leg and the arm, said most of those who died belonged to two families. "They had no mercy for the children. They had no mercy for the women. They could see that small children were being hit by bullets, but they kept firing," he said.

The murders came after several weeks of demonstrations across Pakistan by extremist religious parties protesting at the country's support for the American bombing of Afghanistan.

Bishop John Victor Mall, from the Multan diocese of the Church of Pakistan, an umbrella group for Protestants, said the Christian community had been feeling insecure for some weeks. "We have not felt safe at all. Now we are just stunned, in complete shock," he said. "This Christian community has been here for many, many years but we are still unsafe."

The 750,000 Christians in Pakistan, most of whom are Catholics, are a legacy of British rule. Christian communities exist in harmony with Muslims in many towns and cities, but Bahawalpur has experienced tensions in the past.

Many Christians in the diocese blamed the security services for not taking the threats against the church seriously. Aub Sajid, director in Multan of Caritas, the Catholic social organisation, said that despite repeated requests for more security at the church, the police had provided just one officer.

"The authorities did not take this seriously enough. Now all these innocent people are dead." As the dead and injured were taken to the town's Civil Hospital, relatives who had witnessed the massacre ran riot in the hospital, threatening doctors and destroying medical equipment.

Haris Ikram, head of Bahawalpur police, confirmed that 16 people had died in the attack. Members of Sipah-i-Shabah were being hunted last night but no arrests had been made. The organisation, which is banned in the Punjab, is one of four religious groups that have been travelling the country calling for all Muslims to join the jihad in Afghanistan.

Shehbaz Bhatti, president of the Christian Liberation Front, condemned the incident as "barbaric" and demanded that the government make quick arrests. He also demanded more security for the minority of Christians living in Pakistan, where 97 per cent of the population is Muslim.

British condemnation of the attack was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey. "I condemn unreservedly the killing of Christian worshippers in Pakistan. I call upon everyone to recognise that this is not a conflict between Christianity and Islam," he said.

"My prayers and thoughts are with the families of the bereaved." In The Vatican, Pope John Paul II called the killings an "evil act" and a "tragic act of intolerance" and offered prayers to the victims' families.

The most senior Asian in the Church of England, the Rt Rev Dr Michael James Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, said the massacre had come as no surprise to him. Dr Nazir-Ali, who was born in Karachi in 1949, was forced to leave Pakistan in 1987.

It was urgent for Pakistan to get rid of the new clause in its Penal Code 295 that made it mandatory for courts to pass the death sentence on anyone convicted of blasphemy against Islam or the Prophet Mohammed, he added. "In his early days, [President] Musharraf did try to get rid of the new clause in the blasphemy law but there was so much opposition that he gave up."

In further violence in Pakistan last night, at least three people died and 25 were injured when a bomb exploded on a bus in Quetta, the capital of the Baluchistan province, bordering Afghanistan.

The bus was travelling through a heavily guarded military cantonment in the south-west of the city. Two soldiers were among the dead.

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