Teenage bomber kills 9 Pakistani Shi'ites

By Kamran Haider

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - A teenaged suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded Shi'ite Muslim prayer hall in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Thursday, killing at least nine people and wounding 25, a government official said.

Pakistan's minority Shi'ites are observing a mourning period for the anniversary of the death of Iman Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, when sectarian violence often flares.

"It could be a conspiracy to spread religious hatred, to pit Muslim against Muslim," said Ghulam Ali, a district government chief in the northwestern city.

He said authorities had recovered 10 bodies, some badly mutilated, one of which was apparently that of the bomber, who an Interior Ministry spokesman said was about 16 years old.

Pakistan saw a surge of religious violence in the 1980s with the emergence of militant groups, most of them Sunni Muslim, funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Shi'ite radical groups after the 1979 Islamic revolution in majority Shi'ite Iran.

While ordinary Sunni and Shi'ite Pakistanis live together peacefully, radicals from the two sects have inflicted a bloody toll in tit-for-tat assassinations and bomb attacks since then.

The 40-day Shi'ite mourning period has become a lightning rod for sectarian violence.

One witness said he heard gunshots just before the blast.