Qamar Suleman had just left his house for Friday prayers in the Garhi Shahu neighbourhood of Pakistan's Lahore when gunfire and explosions erupted at the end of his street.

As a member of the Ahmadis, a heavily persecuted minority Islamic sect that hardliners deem to be heretics, he instantly feared the worst.

He ran towards the Darul Zikr mosque, where scores of his friends and relatives were gathered, arriving just in time to see the gunmen claim their first victims. "The first people they shot were the boys outside the mosque who were in charge of security," he said. "They were just young boys. They weren't armed in any way."

It was part of a brazen double-pronged assault yesterday on the Ahmadi sect. Suicide bombers and men wielding AK47s and grenades stormed two Lahore mosques within minutes of each other, slaughtering more than 70 people and injuring some 120.

Police said that at least seven attackers were involved, including three bombers and a gunman mounted atop a minaret who sprayed bullets into the crowds of worshippers below.

"It was like a war going on around me," said Luqman Ahmed, who was at the second mosque in the Model Town neighbourhood. "I kept on praying, 'May God save me from this hell'."

The attack on that mosque, near the centre of Pakistan's second city, ended fairly quickly, with commandos storming the building to find scores of dead bodies on different floors.

Two of the four gunmen are thought to have escaped.

In Garhi Shahu, the death toll is thought to be higher. Three militants held several people hostage inside the mosque in a siege that lasted four hours. "They fought the police for some time, but on seeing they were being defeated they exploded themselves," said Sajjad Bhutta, Lahore's top police official.

The attacks were a brutal reminder that despite Pakistan's recent offensive in the tribal areas near the Afghan border, militants still have the ability to strike deep inside the country.

The identity of the attackers remains unclear, though it is widely suspected to have been the work of Punjabi extremists linked to the Pakistani Taliban and associated with al-Qaeda.