The bombing of Lahore's most popular park is the bloodiest attempt yet by a new Islamic extremist faction to establish itself as the most aggressive and violent of the many such groups active in Pakistan.
The target was the country’s long-beleaguered Christian community, according to a credible claim of responsibility from Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a group founded about two years ago after a split within the fragmented movement known as the Pakistan Taliban.
However, many Muslims were among the scores of victims when a suicide bomber detonated a nail-filled device near a children’s playground. This is unlikely to bother the perpetrators.
Extremist clerics have made sustained efforts to find theological justification for such casualties in recent decades and, although such arguments are contested by mainstream scholars, they are preached in hardline mosques and taught in many religious schools in Pakistan.
The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, like the broader Pakistan Taliban, follow an extremist branch of the rigorously conservative Deobandi strand of Islam, which, along with equally intolerant schools of practice influenced by those in the Gulf, has made major inroads in Pakistan in recent years at the expense of more open-minded local traditions.
The group, based in a restive zone along Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan, has been responsible for a string of attacks, often on government workers or religious minorities, and has explicitly said it is at war against an "unbeliever state".
It styles itself the “real” Pakistan Taliban and is opposed to a strategy of negotiations adopted by the movement’s official leadership following a major assault on its strongholds launched in 2014.
This latest attack appears designed to send a clear message to local policymakers, as well as exploit anger among what appears to be a significant number of Pakistanis following the execution earlier in March of a man who in 2011 shot dead a leading politician who sought to protect Christians.
More than 100,000 people attended the funeral in Mumtaz Qadri, the killer, in the city of Rawalpindi on March 1st. Riot police used teargas to dispel protests against the execution by conservatives on Sunday.
Qadri's victim was the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, who had called for the pardoning of a Christian woman jailed under harsh blasphemy laws.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar appear to be making a push into Punjab, Pakistan's wealthiest and most populous province, which is also the power base of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister.
The group bombed a popular ceremony at the border post of Wagah in November 2014.
Punjab has long been the fiefdom of Islamist militant groups, which have relationships with Pakistani security services and usually refrain from striking within the country.
Officials from the police and other agencies in Lahore have long expressed concerns about other groups, especially those linked to the Pakistan Taliban, establishing networks in the city.
"We know they are here but don't know why they haven't attacked yet," one senior police officer said in 2013. They have now. – (Guardian service)