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Taleban gunmen kill Pakistani religious scholar, Allama Nasir Abbas

The Pakistani Taleban claimed responsibility, saying the killing was revenge for an attack in the city of Rawalpindi.

Allama Nasir Abbas was killed late on Sunday in Lahore after addressing a religious gathering, police said, adding that the attackers managed to flee.

“Two attackers on motorcycle opened fire on his vehicle. Primarily it was an incident of targeted killing,” senior police official Rana Abdul Jabbar told reporters.

Local media said the cleric’s driver and a security guard were wounded in the attack.

The Pakistani Taleban claimed responsibility, saying the killing was revenge for an attack in the city of Rawalpindi.

“We have killed this man for his direct involvement in the Rawalpindi killings,” said the a Taleban spokesman, Ahmed Ali Entiqami. “We plan to carry out more (such) killings on a large scale.”

People from a religious group protested over the killing at the hospital late on Sunday and in front of the Punjab governor’s house early on Monday, police said.

In Lahore, hundreds of people gathered on Monday to offer funeral prayers of the cleric, paralysing traffic in Pakistan’s political and cultural capital. There has been a rise in sectarian violence in Pakistan after several deadly clashes near the capital Islamabad in November.

On November 19 gunmen killed a university director along with his driver in Lahore, while another religious leader and his guard were killed in Karachi in early December. Three days later, Shamsur Rehman Muawiya, chief of the Ahl-e-Sunnat Wal Jamaat for Punjab province, was killed in Lahore.