Blast in mosque kills three people in NW Pakistan

PESHAWAR (Reuters) - An explosion in a mosque killed three people and wounded several others Saturday, in a region in northwestern Pakistan plagued by violence between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, police said.

The attack targeted a mosque in a Sunni neighborhood of Hangu, a town in North West Frontier Province that has suffered several sectarian attacks before.

"So far we have pulled out three bodies from the rubble. Two of them are children," Hangu police chief Sajjad Ahmed told Reuters.

Hangu district borders the Kurram tribal region where around 200 people were killed in clashes between Sunnis and Shi'ites earlier this year.

Friday a bomb killed ten people and wounded 40 at a funeral for a Shi'ite Muslim in Dera Ismail Khan. The funeral was for a man gunned down Thursday. On the morning of the funeral gunmen killed a Shi'ite cleric.

Sectarian violence between militant groups has haunted Dera Ismail Khan, a district bordering the South Waziristan tribal region, where support runs deep for the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Both the Taliban and al Qaeda are Sunni and some of their cohorts, like Laskhar-e-Janghvi, are strongly anti-Shi'ite.

Thousands of people have been killed in tit-for-tat sectarian violence going back to the 1980s.

The majority of Pakistan's Muslims are Sunni but around 15 percent of the nation of 170 million people are Shi'ite.

(Additional reporting by Aftab Borka, Alamgir Bitani and Ali Afzaal; Writing by Simon Cameron-Moore; Editing by Sami Aboudi)