A bomb blast inside a Shi'ite mosque during evening prayers killed at least 15 people yesterday in the southern city of Karachi, where a senior cleric from Pakistan's majority Sunni sect was gunned down a day earlier.

Doctors at three city hospitals told Reuters reporters they had counted 15 dead so far, while an angry crowd milling around in the darkness outside the cordoned-off mosque talked of more bodies inside the shattered building. Doctors said about 55 had been wounded.

Fears of a fresh round of inter-Muslim sectarian violence ran high in Karachi after the killing on Sunday of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a radical Sunni preacher, and thousands of police were deployed at mosques in anticipation of a backlash.

The blast at the Ali Raza Imam Bargah mosque was less than a mile away from where Mr Shamzai, a pro-Taliban cleric who called for "jihad", or holy war, against the United States, was killed. A suicide bomber killed 24 people and wounded 125 in an attack on a Shi'ite mos-que earlier last month.