Zahra Shahid Hussain, central leader of Imran Khan's party, shot dead hours before re-polling begins in port city.
A senior member of Pakistani politician Imran Khan's party has been killed in Karachi in an attack capping a bloody election campaign that has claimed scores of people nationwide.
Zahra Shahid Hussain, the central vice president of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party and one of its founding members, was killed late on Saturday hours before re-elections began on Sunday.
The motives behind the attack remained unclear.
Hussain "was leaving her home for some work when three gunmen attacked her. She thought they wanted to snatch her purse and handed it over to them but they killed her", Firdous Shamim, a local PTI leader, told the AFP news agency.
Police said all three assailants escaped after the attack late on Saturday.
"They shot her with one bullet near her chin and she could not survive," Nasir Aftab, senior police official, told AFP.
Last week's election, during which 150 people were killed nationwide, gave the rival Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which controls Karachi, 18 of 19 national assembly seats in the port city. The constituency where Sunday's repoll is taking place, known blandly as NA-250, is thought to be a stronghold of the PTI.
Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from the capital Islamabad, said: "The very initial reports surrounding the killing of Zahra Shahid Hussain indicate that this could have been a robbery, for Karachi is prone to violence."
On average 12 people are killed in Karachi every single day, he said.
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