Pakistan on Friday summoned the US ambassador and lodged a strong protest over a drone strike in a tribal region which killed 35 people, the foreign ministry said.

The Pakistan government on Wednesday orchestrated the release of proclaimed US diplomat and alleged Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor Raymond Davis by invoking the Islamic provision of diyat (blood money).

At least 20 people were killed and several injured on Wednesday in a suicide blast during funeral prayers in Pakistan's Peshawar city, Geo News reported. The blast occurred in Adezai area of Peshawar city, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

A massive blast at a gas station in Pakistan's central Punjab province on Tuesday killed 13 people and injured 35 others, officials said.

Two months after (Pakistan) Punjab governor Salman Taseer was shot dead by his own bodyguard in Lahore for his opposition to the country’s harsh blasphemy law, another high-profile Pakistani, Cabinet minister Shahbaz Bhatti, was assassinated in Islamabad on Wednesday morning over the same issue.

Pakistan is being swept toward violent chaos by a growing wave of Islamist extremism, newspapers said on Thursday, a day after Taliban militants killed the country's only Christian government minister.

Gunmen shot dead Pakistan's minority affairs minister Shahbaz Bhatti in Islamabad on Wednesday, doctor Azmat ullah Qureshi, spokesman for the local Shifa hospital said.

Gunmen shot dead Pakistan's minority affairs minister in Islamabad on Wednesday, police and a hospital doctor said, after the Christian politician had complained of death threats.

Pakistan's minority affairs minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a vocal critic of the controversial blasphemy law, was on Wednesday shot dead by gunmen who ambushed his car near his residence here, the second high-profile politician to be assassinated in nearly two months.

Apparently stung by his own ruling PPP's stonewalling, former minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has pleaded with the leadership for reasons for divesting him of the key portfolio of the foreign minister.