Gunmen kill Shiite director of Pakistan university

LAHORE, Pakistan- Unidentified gunmen riding a motorcycle on Tuesday killed a senior Shiite university director along with his driver in central Pakistan, officials said.

In an apparent sectarian attack, Syed Shabir Hussain Shah, director of student affairs at Gujrat University in Punjab province, was attacked while on his way to the campus.

“Gunmen riding a motorbike sprayed bullets on his vehicle when he was about to reach the university campus in (the) morning. His driver was also killed in the attack,” district police chief Ali Nasir Rizvi told AFP.

“At the moment, we don’t know about the numbers of the attackers, but the incident looks like a targeted killing,” he said.

Officials suspected the attack came as retaliation for violence in the garrison city of Rawalpindi on Friday in which a mainly Sunni mosque was burnt and 10 people were killed.

“He was a Shiite by sect, but a very progressive official of the campus,” Sheikh Abdul Rashid, a spokesman for the university, told AFP.

Another colleague said Shah had previously received threats.

“He had been threatened by unknown people in the past,” a professor at Gujrat University said on condition of anonymity.

Authorities in the northwestern city of Kohat imposed a curfew on Monday after a fresh round of sectarian violence left four people dead, officials said.

Separately, in a suburb of the troubled northwestern city of Peshawar, two unidentified gunmen riding a motorcycle Tuesday killed a policeman guarding a church.

Senior police official Najibur Rehman told AFP the attackers took the dead policeman’s rifle and fled.

A twin suicide bombing killed more than 80 people at a church service in Peshawar late September in what is believed to be the deadliest attack on Christians in the country.

Pakistan is facing rising sectarian violence, with Sunni militant groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban often attacking gatherings of Shiites, who make up some 20 percent of the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim population.