Pakistan mosque suicide bomber ‘was in police uniform’
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: The suicide bomber was wearing a uniform and helmet when he staged the attack inside a mosque at a police headquarters in Pakistan, a police chief said yesterday.
Hundreds of police were attending afternoon prayers in what should have been a tightly controlled compound in the northwest city of Peshawar on Monday when the blast erupted, causing a wall to collapse and crush officers.
“Those on duty didn’t check him because he was in a police uniform... It was a security lapse,” Moazzam Jah Ansari, the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police force, told a news conference.
Police have a ‘fair idea’ about who the bomber was after matching his head found at the scene with CCTV images.
“There’s an entire network behind him,” Ansari said, explaining that the bomber had not planned the assault alone.
Authorities are investigating how a major breach could happen in one of the most sensitive areas of the city, which houses intelligence and counterterrorism bureaus and is next door to the regional secretariat.
It is Pakistan’s deadliest assault in several years and the
We have detained people from the police line (headquarters) to get to the bottom of how the explosive material made its way in and to see if any police officials were also involved in the attack.
Senior city police official
worst since violence began to resurge in the region after the Afghan Taliban takeover in Kabul in 2021.
Authorities are also investigating the possibility that people inside the compound helped to coordinate the attack, a senior city police official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Wednesday.
“We have detained people from the police line (headquarters) to get to the bottom of how the explosive material made its way in and to see if any police officials were also involved in the attack,” he told AFP.
The police official said at least 23 people had been detained, including some from the nearby former tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
The assault has put a scarred city on edge, harking back to more than a decade ago when Peshawar was at the centre of rampant militancy carried out by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) before a clearance operation flushed them into the mountainous border and Afghanistan.
Analysts say militants have become emboldened since US and Nato troops withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban swept into Kabul, with Islamabad accusing them of failing to secure their borders.
Security forces have since become the target of increasing low-level attacks, often at checkpoints.
The assaults are claimed mostly by the TTP as well, as the local chapter of the Islamic State, but mass casualty attacks remain rare.
The TTP has distanced itself from the Peshawar mosque blast, claiming it no longer attacks places of worship. However, police said authorities were investigating whether an occasional affiliate of the group was responsible.
Police officials yesterday say the death toll from a blast at a Pakistan mosque targeting police officers has been revised down to 84.
The figure had earlier been put at 101 killed, in the suicide attack inside a police headquarters in Peshawar on Monday.
“The confusion arose and wrong statistics came out due to double registration by the families in the hospitals,” Peshawar city police chief Muhammad Ijaz Khan told AFP.
“Now that the rescue work has been completed, we have completed the statistics, according to which 84 people were martyred.”
He said 83 were policemen, while one was a civilian woman living and working on the compound.