LAHORE, Pakistan — Riaz Masih and Nasreen Riasat had been married for four years, with their first child on the way in just a month, when they decided a slow walk in the park would be just the thing to enjoy a pleasant Sunday evening in Lahore.
In a moment of calculated cruelty, they were thrust into the long roll call of families victimized by a jihadi suicide bomber on the Easter holiday, and among the vast accounting of terrorism's toll on a country racked by extremism, again and again, for years.
"I can't figure out what happened!" Masih said, his voice choking with grief as he lay in a bed at Lahore's Jinnah Hospital on Monday. Riasat, his wife, was torn apart by the bomber's blast, she and their soon-to-be-born child among the dozens killed. "Within minutes, I lost my wife. I couldn't save her."
Muhammad Kasim, a 25-year-old mechanic from out of town, was buying tickets to the children's rides in the park for a group of family and friends when he felt the explosion. Running to the corner where his relatives were waiting, he found horror: an aunt killed, along with the excited 2-year-old daughter of a friend.
"Twelve of my relatives are wounded and under treatment," he said, exhausted and still wearing his bloodstained shirt on Monday at the overwhelmed hospital. "I haven't slept since yesterday, and I have no time to eat since I am the only one attending to my wounded relatives."
Shock and grief enveloped Pakistan on Monday as the official death toll from the attack in Lahore a day earlier rose to at least 72, with 341 people reported wounded by officials.
In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to fight terrorism "until it is rooted out from our society." And the country's powerful military, credited with greatly reducing militant attacks over the past two years, said it was beginning a new round of operations in Punjab province, Pakistan's most populous region and the home to Lahore.
Extremist groups have long made a campaign of attacking religious or ethnic minorities in Punjab. The attack on Sunday was claimed by Jamaat-e-Ahrar, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, which said it was targeting Christians who had gathered in the park for Easter. But Pakistani officials went to pains to say that the toll was unselective, with Muslims and Christians among the dead and bereaved. Most of the victims were working-class, or poorer.
The attack came just days after the National Assembly adopted a resolution to recognize Easter and the Hindu festivals of Holi and Diwali as public holidays, in what some here saw as a vital call for tolerance and others saw as offensive in a state officially built on Islam. That gesture, too, was marred by the bomber's strike.
Lahore is a magnet on spring weekends, with crowds drawn to the city's famous parks and monuments, and its shopping centers. Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, where the bomber struck after pacing its crowded parking lot, is one of the largest and most popular public parks here.
Facing heavy criticism on Monday, officials acknowledged that while security measures had been intensified around mosques and, especially, churches on Sunday, little attention had been paid to the public parks.
On Monday, the city shut down around its pain. All public parks and the Lahore Zoo were closed, as were most of the shopping and commercial centers. A spring festival was canceled.
But at Lahore's hospitals, distraught relatives were pouring in. And at the city's cemeteries, the funerals began.
In Youhanabad, a suburb with a large Christian population, funeral services were held for three teenagers. Four others from the neighborhood were wounded. Yousaf Samuel Benjamin was at a service to mourn a young family friend, a 17-year-old named Aaron, even as he and others awaited word about the teenager's brother, Sherry Patras. "No one knows whether Sherry is still alive," he said, "or whether he was also shattered into pieces."
Inayat Masih, a grieving father, demanded to know why his 17-year-old son, Wasif, and two of the son's friends deserved death. "They were innocent!" Masih said. "I can only pray that they find peace wherever they are now."
Rashida Bibi, 50, who was being treated for head injuries, said she and 32 members of her extended family had come to Lahore from Sahiwal, another city in Punjab, to enjoy their Sunday. "We were at the swings," she said. "Suddenly there was a blast and I fell down. I cannot describe the terrible scenes."
Naveed Ahmed, 33, a power loom worker from Faisalabad, said two of his nephews were badly wounded in the explosion. "My 9-year-old nephew, Owais, was so close to the blast that the explosive material severely bruised his body, and doctors had to operate on his lower abdomen and throat," Ahmed said.
A cousin, Adnan, 15, had both legs fractured.
Ahmed said he was shocked to see some men begin stealing even as people lay hurt and screaming for help. "I am deeply saddened and unable to understand how even after such a tragedy — how could some people start stealing?" he said. Owais, who was still conscious after the blast, was trying to call his mother when a thief snatched his phone away.
Others recounted how rescue workers struggled to save the wounded at a scene of utter chaos, with the power cut and victims writhing and screaming.
One of the rescuers, Mohammad Ahmad, remained deeply shaken on Monday.
"It was very difficult," he said. "We felt as if we were standing on a pool of blood and strewn body parts. "The giant skywheel at the park had stopped working and people were stuck. Their screams are still haunting me."
On Monday afternoon, shoes and shreds of clothing were still strewn about in the parking lot, framed behind a police cordon.