REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, PESHAWAR -- Gunmen killed a Shiite Muslim scholar in the restive northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Monday, police and hospital officials said.
Allama Alim Al-Musvi was shot while walking to the mosque in the historic Kissa Khwani market of Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber Pakhtukhwa province that borders Afghanistan, police said.
"Two gunmen opened fire on the scholar and escaped in the narrow streets when he came out of his house and walked towards the mosque," local police official Fazal Jan told AFP.
Al-Musvi was a locally respected scholar and used to deliver sermons at special Shiite gatherings, he added.
A government hospital spokesman, Jamil Khan, confirmed the death.
There has been a rise in sectarian violence in Pakistan after several deadly clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups near the capital Islamabad in November.
On November 19 gunmen killed a senior Shiite university director along with his driver in Lahore, while another Shiite leader and his guard were killed in Karachi in early December.
Three days later, Shamsur Rehman Muawiya, chief of the Sunni extremist organisation Ahl-e-Sunnat Wal Jammat for Punjab province, was killed in Lahore.
On January 3 gunmen killed two senior members of a hardline Sunni Muslim group in a rare attack in the Pakistani capital.
Pakistan is rife with sectarian clashes, with Sunni militant groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban often attacking gatherings by Shiites, who constitute some 20 percent of the country's predominantly Muslim population.
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