Soon after the bang the city wore a deserted look with vehicular traffic immensely jammed on main thoroughfares and Inspector General Sindh Police Azhar Ali Farooqui declaring high alert in the post-December 27 violence-hit metropolis.
-- The blast ripped through a crowd outside a textile factory in Landhi.
-- Officials say Musharraf and Zardari were far away from the scene. According to police sources, the bomb was fixed to a motorbike parked in a fruit market while some others believed that the bomb was planted in a pushcart. The injured were rushed to the Jinnah Post-Graduate Medical College and Hospital (JPMCH) and a nearby hospital by scores of Edhi and Cheepa ambulances who had reached the site within few minutes of the unfortunate incident, sources in the two welfare charities said.
"At least eight bodies and 52 injured were brought to the hospital," sources in the hospital said. The Sindh government constituted a committee to investigate explosion. Condemnation of the deadly blast came from the president, prime minister, Sindh governor and chief minister and leaders of almost all political parties of the country.
AFP ADDS: Asif Ali Zardari, flew in to the city minutes before the bomb went off, although officials said both he and Musharraf were far away from the scene of the blast. "The bomb was planted on a motorbike and exploded outside a textile factory in the Landhi.
"I was leaving the factory when I heard a huge explosion and I saw several people lying in pools of blood on the road. There were more than 30 people who were hit by the blast," eyewitness Rehman Malik told AFP.
"As soon as the bomb went off the electricity pylon caught fire and the lights went out. There were bodies lying all around and I could hear people screaming in the darkness," he added. Wounded people covered in blood and with their clothes blown off by the force of the blast were brought to hospitals in ambulances and the back of pick-up trucks, an AFP reporter said. Gunfire erupted in the area in the wake of the attack.
The district is a stronghold of supporters belonging to a rival splinter group of a political party that supports Musharraf. Musharraf, who rarely leaves the capital Islamabad because of security concerns, was in the city to meet officials from the provincial caretaker government, officials said.
The blast on Monday was the first in the teeming metropolis of Karachi since a double suicide attack on a parade to welcome Benazir home from exile in October. Bhutto survived that attack but 139 people were killed.
However it is already the third deadly bombing in Pakistan this year. The worst was a suicide attack in the eastern city of Lahore on Thursday that killed 22 policemen and eight civilians.
In another incident on Monday, a crudely made bomb went off in the election office of a nationalist party in Peshawar, wounding one person, police said. More than 800 people have been killed in attacks - mainly suicide bombings targeting the security forces - in Pakistan over the past year, making 2007 the deadliest for militant violence in the country's history.