Pakistani Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti has been shot dead by gunmen who ambushed his car in broad daylight in the capital, Islamabad.
He was travelling to work through a residential district when his vehicle was sprayed with bullets, police said.
Bhatti, the cabinet’s only Christian minister, had received death threats for urging reform to blasphemy laws.
Bhatti, 42, a leader of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), had just left his mother’s home in a suburb of the capital when several gunmen surrounded his vehicle and riddled it with bullets, say witnesses.
Senior police officials said Bhatti had been assigned police and paramilitary troops, but had asked them not to travel with him at the time. In recent weeks Bhatti had been concerned about security.
Bhatti was taken to the nearby Shifa hospital, but was dead on arrival. (BBC)
