Fourteen South Asian pilgrims were ambushed and killed on their way to Shiite Muslim sites in Iraq, hospital, police and army sources said on Saturday.
An official at the al-Hussein hospital in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where the bodies were taken on Friday, said the five women and nine men were all Pakistanis and had their hands bound and had been shot in the head.
“They were killed three days ago. Some were tortured. One body had been beheaded,” the official said, citing a report from the hospital’s mortuary.
An Interior Ministry source in Baghdad said three of the 14 were Indian citizens.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Islamabad said Pakistan’s missions in Jordan and Kuwait were trying to confirm the report. Pakistan withdrew its diplomats from Baghdad after its envoy survived an attack on his convoy in 2005.
Police and the hospital source in Karbala said the group was ambushed in a minibus heading through western Iraq from Syria, close to a well-known rest-stop on the largely empty main highway across the desert, west of the city of Ramadi.
The area, Anbar province, is the heartland of Sunni Muslim minority revolt.
Shiite pilgrims have been frequent targets for attack. Just last week, a statement purportedly from al-Qaida’s Iraqi umbrella group urged Sunnis, who form the majority among the world’s Muslims but a minority in Iraq, to launch a holy war against Shiites.
“This is something that has been happening for centuries. They (pilgrims) go regularly. We have been cautioning people but we do not stop them,” Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said.
About 20 percent of Pakistan’s 160 million people are Shiites. Most of the rest are Sunni Muslim.
