Thousands of people Saturday attended the funeral of 14 people killed in Friday's double suicide bomb attack on Shiites in Karachi, as the death toll from the assault rose overnight to 31.
Suicide bombers rammed into a bus Friday then, in the day's second assault, hit a hospital where casualties had been rushed for treatment.
"Six more people died overnight, raising the death toll to 31," provincial government spokesman Jameel Soomro told AFP.
He said at least 170 wounded people were being treated at various hospitals around Karachi.
At a funeral Saturday for some of those killed, thousands of mourners beat their chests and cried loudly as the bodies of 14 victims were brought to a Karachi sports field.
Pakistani TV channels broadcast live footage from the venue, showing men and women clad in black and carrying black flags, beating their chests and chanting slogans of "Ya Hussein, Ya Hussein."
Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, was martyred in the Iraqi city of Karbala along with his 72 companions some 1,400 years ago.
"More than 10,000 people attended the funeral of the 14 deceased," said a local police official, Javed Mehr, who was deployed at the ground.
Mehr told AFP that "the entire area was sealed off by police and paramilitary rangers to avoid any untoward incident."
Women and children were among 12 people killed Friday when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle rammed into a bus carrying Shiites to a religious procession marking the last day of the Shiites' holy month of Muharram.
A second bomber killed 13 people, damaged ambulances and the entrance to the casualty department at Jinnah Hospital, where victims of the first attack were being treated and anxious relatives were gathering.
Karachi's roads were mostly deserted Saturday while shops, business centres and educational institutions were closed as the port city mourned those killed in the two bombings.
Police and paramilitary rangers patrolled streets and sensitive areas and Mehr said security had been stepped up at all hospitals and sensitive areas around Karachi, which has been swept by political violence in recent months.
At least 37 activists from rival parties in the local government were killed over the past five days, following 48 similar killings last month.
The attacks in a city largely isolated from Islamist violence highlighted the instability in Pakistan, which is on the frontline of the US war on Al-Qaeda and where militants have killed more than 3,000 people since 2007.
On December 28, 43 people were killed in a bomb attack that turned a religious procession marking Ashura, the first day of Muharram, into a bloodbath.
Sectarian violence periodically flares between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, with the latter accounting for about 20 percent of Pakistan's 167 million people. Such violence has killed more than 4,000 people since the late 1980s.
