Six people were burnt alive when a mob protesting a suicide bombing of a mosque torched an outlet of an American fast food chain in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.

Pakistani poor boys search useful items from the rubble as a police van parked outside the damaged Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant in Karachi Pakistan Tuesday, May 31, 2005. Police on Tuesday recovered bodies of six employees of a KFC restaurant that was set on fire by a mob angry over a suicide attack at a Shiite mosque in Karachi, raising the overall death toll in the violence to 11, officials said. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil)

Police and firemen recovered the bodies of six Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) employees after an angry mob set the restaurant on fire late Monday following a suicide attack on a Shiite Muslim mosque here that left five people dead.

"Their bodies were found during the search of KFC," city police chief Tariq Jamil told AFP.

Three attackers stormed the minority Shiite Madinat-ul-Ilm mosque in the middle-class Gulshan neighborhood during evening prayers late Monday.

One of the assailants died in a gunbattle with police while the other blew himself up and the third sustained a serious head injury in a fall, Jamil said.

Hospital officials said the man was unconscious but in stable condition.

Police believe his survival could be the key to the investigation into suicide bombings.

Two worshippers and one policeman also died in the attack, while 21 people, four of whom were in a critical condition, were hospitalized.

Angry protesters went on the rampage after the attack, setting fire to two gas stations and a number of vehicles in addition to the KFC outlet.

The attack on the mosque came just three days after 19 people, most of them Shiites, died in a suicide bomb blast at a Muslim shrine near the capital Islamabad.

Thousands of Shiite and majority Sunni Muslims have been killed in sectarian bloodshed in Pakistan in recent years, with attacks including bomb blasts, suicide bombings and targeted killings. Last year 160 people were killed.

© Copyright 2005 AFP

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