Keen Pain in Pakistan Over Lives ‘Shattered Into Pieces’

Riaz Masih and Nasreen Riasat had been married for four years, with their first child on the way in just a month, when they decided a slow walk in the park would be just the thing to enjoy a pleasant Sunday evening in Lahore.

In a moment of calculated cruelty, they were thrust into the long roll call of families victimized by a jihadist suicide bomber on the Easter holiday, and among the vast accounting of terrorism’s toll on a country racked by extremism, again and again, for years.

“I can’t figure out what happened!” Mr. Masih said, his voice choking with grief as he lay in a bed at Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital on Monday. Ms. Riasat, his wife, was torn apart by the bomber’s blast, she and their soon-to-be-born child among the dozens killed. “Within minutes, I lost my wife. I couldn’t save her.”

Shock and grief enveloped Pakistan on Monday as the official death toll from the attack in Lahore a day earlier rose to at least 72, with 341 people reported wounded by officials.

In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to fight terrorism “until it is rooted out from our society.” And the country’s powerful military, credited with greatly reducing militant attacks over the past two years, said that it was beginning a new round of operations in Punjab Province, Pakistan’s most populous region and the home to Lahore.

Extremist groups have long made a campaign of attacking religious or ethnic minorities in Punjab. The attack on Sunday was claimed by Jamaat-e-Ahrar, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, which said it was targeting Christians who had gathered in the park for Easter. But Pakistani officials went to pains to say the toll was unselective, with Muslims and Christians among the dead and bereaved. Most of the victims were working-class, or poorer.

The attack came just days after the National Assembly adopted a resolution to recognize Easter and the Hindu festivals of Holi and Diwali as public holidays, in what some here saw as a vital call for tolerance and others saw as offensive in a state officially built on Islam. That gesture, too, was marred by the bomber’s strike.

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