(MENAFN- The Peninsula) A hardline Sunni leader and a prominent Shiite lawyer were shot dead in two separate incidents in the Pakistani city of Karachi on Wednesday, police said.
Unknown gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed lawyer Ghulam Hussain Bokhari outside his house before fleeing, senior police official Akhtar Farooq told AFP.
Hussain belonged to the political party Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which controls Karachi, Pakistan's commercial capital.
Farooq said that police are investigating whether it was a politically-related killing or a sectarian murder.
In a separate shooting, gunmen on motorcycles shot Muhammad Fayyaz Khan, secretary general of Sunni hardline outfit Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ), and his driver while they were travelling in an industrial area of Karachi, local police official Azfar Mahesar told AFP.
It is widely believed that the sectarian group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan renamed itself ASWJ after being banned in 2002.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for either of the attacks.
Pakistan has suffered a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiites, who make up around 20 percent of the population.
A suicide bomber last month killed 61 people at a Shiite mosque in the southern Pakistani district of Shikarpur.
Around 1,000 Shiites have been killed in the past two years in Pakistan, with many of the attacks claimed by banned Sunni militant outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).
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