Karachi (ANTARA News/Reuters) - Four people, including three Muslim clerics, were gunned down and one wounded in a drive-by shooting in Pakistan`s biggest city of Karachi in a suspected sectarian attack, police said on Friday.

Saeed Ahmed Jalalpuri, a senior Sunni Muslim cleric, was ambushed by three gunmen riding on a motor-bike as he was travelling in a car with his three colleagues late on Thursday.

"The attackers opened indiscriminate firing on the car of Mr. Saeed Jalalpuri as he was returning home after delivering a sermon in his mosque," Karachi police chief Wasim Ahmed told Reuters.

Two other clerics and a friend of Jalalpuri travelling in the car were killed while another man was wounded, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

"It is a targeted attack. It could be a sectarian attack. We are looking at all possibilities," Ahmed said.

Earlier on Thursday, gunmen attacked a radical Sunni Muslim cleric, Abdul Ghafoor Nadeem, in the city. Nadeem was wounded but his son was killed in the attack.

Thousands of people have been killed in tit-for-tat attacks by rival militants from Pakistan`s majority Sunni and minority Shi`ite Muslim sects in the past two decades.

Thirty-one people were killed, many of them Shi`ites, in two bomb attacks in Karachi last month when Shi`ites were celebrating a religious ceremony.

Forty-three people were killed in a bomb attack on a Shi`ite procession marking Ashura, one of the most important events in the Shi`ite calender, in December. Officials suspect al Qaeda-backed Sunni Muslim militants were behind these
attacks.

(Uu.SYS/H-RN/S026)

Editor: Suryanto

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