Eight people have been killed and 42 injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a Shi'ite-run charity hotel in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar, officials say, in an apparent sectarian attack.
The blast on Tuesday in a Shi'ite neighbourhood of Peshawar came as a prominent Shi'ite scholar was gunned down in the same part of the city on Tuesday morning, in what also appeared to be a targeted sectarian killing.
"Eight people were killed and twenty six have been injured in a suicide blast outside a local hotel yards away from an imambargah (worship place of the Shi'ites)," senior police official Faisal Mukhtar told AFP.
Pakistan has seen a rise in sectarian violence since several deadly clashes between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim groups near the capital Islamabad in November.
Shafqat Malik, chief of Peshawar's bomb disposal unit, confirmed the explosion was a suicide blast.
"Around six kilograms of explosives were used by the suicide bomber, who walked on foot and blew himself up right in the middle of the hotel and imambargah," he said.
Jamil Shah, a spokesman for the city's government-run Leady Reading Hospital confirmed the casualties.
"Eight dead bodies have been brought to the hospital along with 42 injured," he said.
The blast occurred at a time when Pakistan's elected government had offered negotiations to the Pakistani Taliban, who have waged a bloody campaign against the state by attacking government installations and carrying out suicide blasts in places of worship and markets.
