KARACHI: The bodies of six young devotees with their throats slit were found near a shrine in Gulshan-i-Maymar on Tuesday, police said, claiming that the brutal killings have been traced to a banned militant organisation.

SSP-Central Amir Farooqi quoted shrine caretaker Juman Faqir as saying that the bodies were lying in a makeshift hut in the hilly area, where the Ayub Shah Bokhari Mazar was situated, near Labour Square.

The officer who visited the crime-scene said the police found a dagger at the spot. An ‘Alam Pak’, a portion of the shrine and its wall were also damaged by attackers, said the area police.

Three of the victims permanently stayed there while others belonged to nearby villages who frequently visited it, the SSP said.

Just last week the three-day Urs concluded at the shrine, he said, explaining that each year on the 29th and 30th of Safar and 1st of Rabiul Awal a mela was held there.

The bodies were shifted to the Abbasi Shaheed Hopsital where two of them were identified with the help of national identity cards found in their pockets as Saleem Naseer and Abid Gohar.

Both victims were residents of Yusuf Goth, Gadap Town, the police said.

The other deceased were identified by the caretaker as Munawar, Ramzan, Javed and Gin, the police said.

Additional police surgeon Dr Abdul Haq said two of the deceased were beheaded, while the four others died from wounds caused by throat cut.

The victims aged between 30 and 40, he said.

The Gulshan-i-Maymar police said the men had been trussed up while two of them had also been blindfolded before being killed.

The police said the victims resided in a small room by the mazar established at a height of seven to eight feet in the hilly area.

Quoting the caretaker of the shrine, the police said he left for home on Monday night after seeing the visitors. As a matter of routine the three men who permanently resided there used to visit his home in the morning for breakfast, the police said. When none of them turned up till 11am on Tuesday, he went up and found their bodies lying in a pool of blood.

So far no one has publicly claimed the responsibility for the six murders.

An senior official requesting anonymity said the police investigators found a note at the spot inscribed with the signature of the banned Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan that claimed the responsibility.

“This will be the destiny of those who visit the mazar,” the note added.

According to Gul Hasan Kalmati, who has written a book on Karachi, there was only one old shrine — Abdul Karim Shah Mazar — in Tharo Mengal Goth of Gulshan-i-Maymar where a mela and a camel race used to take place annually. He was of the opinion that the Ayub Shah Mazar might have been established in recent years.

SSP Farooqi said the shrine was established 12 to 15 years ago.

The police said militants wielded significant influence in the hilly area.

It is worth noting that the police had recently claimed to have killed a local leader of the banned TTP, Amir Hamza, in an alleged encounter in Gulshan-i-Maymar. He was allegedly involved in attacks on polio teams and had also murdered senior activist of the Awami National Party Din Mohammed Wazir-Mehsud in the same area.

This was the second attack on a shrine in Karachi by suspected militants, as in a previous one on the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine in Clifton on Oct 7, 2010, around eight visitors were killed and over 60 others wounded when two suicide bombers blew themselves up.