KARACHI: Some 17 people, including women and children, were injured in a cracker explosion in an Orangi Town area on Sunday evening, police said.

They said that unknown men riding a motorcycle threw a cracker outside the house of a man belonging to the Barelvi school of thought, who held a haleem party every year to give Niaz.

The cracker exploded with a loud bang, injuring several people who were eating haleem there. The assailants, however, rode away.

The wounded were taken to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for treatment.

The explosion caused injuries to 17 people, said additional police surgeon Dr Abdul Haq.

He added that the wounded included three children and six women, but none of them sustained life-threatening injuries.

Pirabad SHO Nasir Mehmood told Dawn that the police were investigating the matter from different angles. “It could be a sectarian attack or carried out due to some personal enmity.”

Scout shot dead

A scout was shot dead and another was wounded in a suspected sectarian attack in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, police said on Sunday.

They said that Wajid Hussain and Ali Imran were going home in Gulistan-i-Jauhar on a motorcycle late on Saturday night when armed pillion riders fired at them on University Road near Mumtaz Manzil within the remit of the Aziz Bhatti police station.

They were taken to a private hospital on Stadium Road where Hussain was pronounced dead, while Imran was admitted for treatment.

The police said that they were on their way home in Gulistan-i-Jauhar from the Numaish area when they were attacked.

However, a spokesperson of the Majlis Wahadat-i-Muslimeen told Dawn that they were on their home after attending a majlis at the Madinat-ul-Ilm Imambargah near Nipa.

He said that it was a sectarian attack.

The official said that both were scouts. Hussain was a resident of Chishti Nagar.

*Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2014