Pakistanis mourn attack on lawyers and a deadly culture war

By targeting lawyers, Islamic radicals appeared to take aim at a pillar of the country's budding civil society — and a symbol of the supremacy of secular law in a modern state.

Tariq Lodhi, a former head of Pakistan's main civil spy agency, told The Associated Press that the attack was carried out by militants to "terrorize lawyers and judges," who are handling cases involving militants accused of carrying out attacks in the country.

In a statement, Ahsanullah Ahsan, a spokesman for the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar — a breakaway faction of the militant Taliban group — said its fighters killed Kasi and dozens of lawyers at the hospital.

Earlier this year, the son of the supreme chief justice of Sindh High Court was kidnapped, and a suicide bomb attack outside a courtroom in Pakistan's north-east killed 11 people in March.

Yet lawyers also represent a powerful segment of Pakistan's civil society, which has played a key role in turning popular opinion against Islamic militant groups such as the Taliban.

For militants, lawyers are representatives of a civil society that increasingly rejects their hard-line interpretations of Islam, and agents of the Pakistani state, which has declared open war on Islamic militant groups.

The brutality of such attacks have undercut militants' support base, but they also underscore concerns that insurgents are still capable of striking in major cities, despite government claims of dismantling various terror networks.