Three suicide bombers targeted a Shiite mourning procession in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore yesterday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 180, police and rescue officials said.

It was the first major attack in Pakistan since devastating floods engulfed a fifth of the volatile country over the past month in the nation’s worst-ever disaster.

The string of blasts ripped through the crowd at the moment of the breaking of fast in the ongoing holy month of Ramadan, and led to an outpouring of fury as mourners tried to torch a nearby police station.

Police fired tear gas shells to force back the surging crowd.

Lahore, a city of eight million near Pakistan’s border with India, has been increasingly subject to Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked attacks in a nationwide bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,300 people in three years.

“The mourning process had just ended when I heard three deafening explosions after brief intervals,” Shahid Hussain, a mourner, said with tears rolling down his cheeks.

People cried and beat their heads and chests at the site of the attacks, chanting slogans against the police and provincial government over their failure to protect the mourners, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.

Injured people lay on the ground crying for help amid the remnants of the crowd, while ambulances drove in and out taking away the scores of wounded.

After the attacks, furious mourners also beat the bodies of two suicide bombers with sticks and shoes.

“Twenty-five people were killed and over 180 others wounded in the three suicide attacks,” a senior local administration official, Sajjad Bhutta, said.

“We have collected bodies of all the three bombers,” he said, adding they were still collecting evidence from the site.

He admitted there may have been a lapse in security.

A local rescue official, Fahim Jehanzeb, also confirmed the death toll.

Top local administration official Khusro Pervez told reporters in Lahore: “The first blast took place immediately after the mourning procession ended, followed by the other two.”

The procession was to mark the martyrdom anniversary of Hazarat Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam and son-in-law of Prophet Mohammed.

Mr Pervez said the police were trying to secure other areas, as the mourners were currently scattered throughout the area known as Karbala Gamey Shah, where the traditional route of the mourning procession ends.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani strongly condemned the attacks and described them as “cowardly acts of terrorism”.

“Those elements playing with the lives of innocent people would not escape the law of the land,” an official statement quoted him as saying in Islamabad.

Religious violence in Pakistan, mostly between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shiites, has killed more than 4,000 people in the past decade and it is not the first time Lahore has seen bombers target religious groups.

In July, twin suicide attacks on an Islamic shrine in Lahore, capital of Punjab province and a major military, political and cultural hub, killed 43 people. The two suicide bombers blew themselves up among crowds of worshippers at the shrine to Sufi saint Data Ganj Bakhsh.

In May, gunmen wearing suicide vests stormed two mosques belonging to the minority Ahmadi sect in Lahore, killing at least 82 people.

Pakistan has been hit by a wave of Islamist militant attacks over the past three years, which many attribute to Islamabad’s alliance with Washington and the US-led war against a resurgent Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The United States last year approved a five-year, $7.5 billion package aimed at reducing the appeal of extremists in the Islamic world’s only declared nuclear power by building infrastructure, schools and democratic institutions.

But the Pakistani public remains enflamed by a covert US drone war against Islamist targets in lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border, which Washington considers the global bastion of Al-Qaeda.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the latest attack, which came as the United States added the Pakistani Taliban to a blacklist of foreign terrorist organizations, meaning members face asset freezes and travel bans.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton designated the Tehreek-e-Taliban as a foreign terrorist organisation on August 12, and it was formally added to the list when it was published Wednesday in the Federal Register.

Widespread flooding in Pakistan has left a confirmed 1,760 people dead and more than 2,000 injured, but officials warn that millions are at risk from food shortages and disease.