Pakistan has called off a military parade on the country’s land crossing with India following the deadly suicide bombing on Sunday that killed 55 people.
India agreed to a request to suspend the daily ritual held at the Wagah border crossing near Lahore to honour the people killed in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan for months.
In the elaborately choreographed flag-lowering ceremony, troops from both sides march around a special parade ground between the two countries before the gates on the only land-crossing point on the recognised border separating Pakistan and India are slammed shut.
On Sunday, a suicide bomber targeted the huge crowds of people as they were leaving the venue.
Police said the device used appeared to be a bomb belt studded with shrapnel, which injured more than 120 others.
Among those killed were three members of the paramilitary Rangers, who are in charge of securing the area and had received intelligence tipoffs in recent days about a possible attack.
Officials said the security cordon and body searches set up to screen people entering the parade ground forced the bomber to detonate the bomb near the car park as people began leaving at the end of the ceremony.
Although Pakistan has frequently been hit by devastating terrorist attacks on markets and places of worship that have killed large numbers of civilians, violence had fallen sharply in 2014 in the wake of infighting within the Pakistani Taliban following the killing of its former leader Hakimullah Mehsud and the launch in June of a major army operation against militant safe havens in North Waziristan.
Sunday’s attack was also unusual for being inside Punjab, the rich, populous province that dominates Pakistan politically, rather than the north-western tribal belt.
Wagah is just 15 miles from Lahore, the home town of the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, which has not experienced an attack on such a scale for several years.
Three separate groups claimed responsibility for the attack, including Jamaat ul Ahrar, one of the most formidable new groups to split away from the Pakistani Taliban this year.
In an emailed statement, the group’s spokesman promised further attacks. He said the Wagah bombing was to avenge the “killing of those innocent people who have been killed by Pakistan army, particularly of those who have been killed in North Waziristan.”
Officials said it was the first time the flag-lowering ceremony had been cancelled since Pakistan fought its third war with India in 1971.
The boisterous display of nationalism continued even during the limited war fought in Kargil in 1999 over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
