Gunmen Kill Ahmadi Doctor in Southern Pakistan

Gunmen in southern Pakistan shot dead a doctor from Pakistan's Ahmadi Muslim minority, police and members of the community said Tuesday, in the latest attack on one of the country's most persecuted groups.

The assailants stormed Mubashar Ahmad Khosa's clinic in the city of Mirpur Khas, which is around 230 km (140 miles) northeast of Karachi, on Monday evening.

"He was attending to patients at his clinic when two unknown assailants came in and fired at him repeatedly before fleeing on a motorbike," a statement by a community group said.

Zafarullah Dharejo, a senior local police official, added that a third attacker kept watch outside.

Khosa, who was a well-known in the area, succumbed to his injuries on his way to hospital.

Dharejo said: "The doctor got a text message half an hour before the murder asking him to come out of his clinic," adding: "We are working on this clue."

The police officer said that in 2008, another Ahmadi doctor was gunned down in a similar way in the same city.

Founded by Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in 1838, the Ahmadi sect has a number of unique views including that Ahmad himself was a prophet and that Jesus died aged 120 in Srinagar, capital of Indian-ruled Kashmir.

Every September, anti-Ahmadi groups hold conferences throughout the country on the anniversary of a 1974 Supreme Court judgment that ruled the group non-Muslims.

Ahmadis are one of the most persecuted minority groups in Pakistan. They are frequently attacked, accused of blasphemy and subjected to discrimination in education and the workplace. They are also banned from going on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

In July, an angry mob torched an Ahmadi neighborhood in the city of Gujranwala, killing a woman and two girls after a local Ahmadi boy was accused of blasphemy.

Analysts say nuclear-armed but poor Pakistan has traditionally fomented religious extremism in order to indoctrinate militants that can be used to fight proxy wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

But the strategy has backfired and the country has been fighting a homegrown Islamist insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives for over a decade.