AKIPRESS.COM - Gunmen on motorcycles killed at least 41 people in an attack on a bus in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi on Wednesday, police said, in the latest violence directed against religious minorities this year, reports Reuters.

Television channels carried pictures of a pink bus covered in bullet holes and lines of waiting ambulances.

"There were six attackers. They boarded the bus and carried out the shooting," Police Superintendent Najib Khan told Reuters.

He said all the passengers were from the Ismaili community, a minority Muslim sect in majority-Sunni Pakistan.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but Taliban splinter groups have bombed several mosques belonging to religious minorities this year.

In March, suicide bombings outside two churches in Lahore killed 14 people and wounded nearly 80. Days later, a bomb after Friday prayers wounded 12 people outside a minority Bohra mosque in Karachi.

In February, 20 people were killed in an attack on a Shi'ite mosque in the northeastern city of Peshawar, and 60 were killed in a January attack on a Shi'ite mosque in the southern province of Sindh.