At least two people were killed and 18 wounded when a grenade was thrown into a rally of an Islamic militant group in Karachi on Sunday, Pakistani police and hospital sources said. The grenade landed among thousands of people at a rally in the port city called by Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the main groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir region. One person was killed instantly and another died later in hospital, doctors said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident, which came a day after Lashkar leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed threatened to send thousands of militants to fight Israel.
A bomb blast at a Lashkar rally last November near the Punjab provincial capital Lahore killed one person and wounded several thousand. At that time, the group blamed Indian agents for the attack. Saeed told the Karachi rally Saturday night that Lashkar's central council had decided to wage 'jihad' (holy war) against Israel in support of the Palestine.

He said that more than 20,000 Lashkar activists had registered their names with the group to fight Israel and that it might send suicide squads there as it had been doing in Kashmir. For about an year, Lashkar squads of two or three fighters each have launched attacks on military camps in the part of Kashmir ruled by India -- about 45 percent of the region. Pakistan controls about a third of Kashmir and China holds the rest of the territory.
Bureau Report