Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minorities minister, who had spoken out in November against a death sentence for a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, has been assassinated. From the Washington Post:

The assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti represented another severe blow to Pakistan’s beleaguered moderates, whose voices are increasingly drowned out by those of violent Muslim hardliners. The shooting came two months after the killing of Punjab province governor Salman Taseer, who, like Bhatti, argued that laws making insults to Islam’s prophet Muhammad a capital crime were wrongly used as tools to persecute religious minorities.
Bhatti, a member of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, was killed by a small team of gunmen that surrounded and fired dozens of shots at his Toyota sedan as he left home for work Wednesday morning. The attackers drove off shortly after the ambush and remained at large in the hours after the killing, police said.
Though there was no claim of responsibility for the killing, fliers found scattered on the road near the scene bore the names of what appeared to be two Islamist militant groups – the Al-Qaeda Organization and the Pakistani Taliban Punjab. The fliers condemned Bhatti as an “infidel, a cursed one” and said others who demonstrate “support of blasphemers” would meet the same fate.