KARACHI, Dec 11: A former union council nazim along with his son and driver were injured in a car blast in Gulshan-i-Iqbal only hours after an activist of the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) was killed in the area on Wednesday afternoon.

While the police said they were not sure about the motive for the killing and the bomb blast, the ASWJ and the Majlis-i-Wahdat-i-Muslimeen in separate statements said they were sectarian attacks.

In some recent ‘sectarian’ attacks in the same neighbourhood, two Karachi University students and a senior leader of MWM Allama Deedar Ali Jalbani along with his guard were gunned down.

Police said the ASWJ activist Qari Mohammed Usman Abbasi, 29, was returning to a Shah Faisal mosque from Gulshan-i-Iqbal Block-6 after teaching the Quran to children in the area when gunmen riding a motorcycle attacked him near the Disco roundabout. He was taken to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital where doctors pronounced him dead. He sustained a single bullet wound in the head, said additional police surgeon Dr Abdul Haq.

“The victim was associated with the ASWJ and it was an act of targeted killing,” said SSP-East Syed Pir Mohammed Shah.

Meanwhile, an ASWJ spokesman condemning the incident said the victim was their worker and a Muezzin of the mosque where he lived. He was father of three children and hailed from Muzaffarabad.

Only a few hours later, three people were injured when a magnetic explosive device attached to their car went off in Gulshan-i-Iqbal on Wednesday, the area police said.

They were on their way to their Abbas Town home from their travel agency situated on Sharea Faisal. When they reached the NIPA bridge, the device went off, wounding Javed Anwar-ul-Hasan Zaidi, his son Adeem Zaidi and their driver Hakim Ali, said Aziz Bhatti SHO Ghulam Hussain Pirzado. The wounded were taken to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.

The driver received serious injuries on several parts of his body and was admitted to the intensive care unit of the ASH, said additional police surgeon Dr Abdul Haq.

“A magnetic device was planted under the driver’s seat,” said an official of the bomb disposal squad. He said the device weighed around one kilo, which was exploded through a mobile phone. It contained ball bearings. The blast also badly damaged the Toyota Corolla car.

DIG-East Munir Shaikh said the investigators were focusing on two aspects of the incident: sectarian, as the victims were Shia and residents of Abbas Town, and travel-related activities as Mr Zaidi was a travel agency owner.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the MWM said Javed Zaidi had remained a nazim of UC-12 in Gulshan Town from the platform of the MQM, the MWM considered it a sectarian attack.