Pakistan arrests 23 after blast
SUICIDE ATTACK: OVER 100 DIE IN MOSQUE EXPLOSION
Officers inside compound may have been involved.
Police in Pakistan have detained 23 people in connection to a blast at a mosque inside a police headquarters that killed at least 101 people, a senior official who asked not to be named said on Wednesday.
Authorities are also probing the possibility that people inside the compound helped to coordinate the attack, the senior provincial police official said on condition of anonymity.
A suicide bomber slipped undetected into a highly sensitive compound in northwest Peshawar and detonated explosives among a row of worshippers in the compound’s mosque on Monday,
causing a wall to collapse and crush officers.
“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,” the senior official said. “The attacker and facilitators might have had links outside Pakistan.”
He said some among the 23 detained were people from the city and nearby former tribal areas which border Afghanistan.
Authorities are investigating how a major security breach could happen in one of the most tightly controlled areas of the city, housing intelligence and counterterrorism bureaus and next door to the regional secretariat.
Low-level militancy, often targeting security checkpoints, has been steadily rising in the areas near Peshawar that border Afghanistan since the Taliban seized control of Kabul in
August 2021.
The assaults are claimed mostly by the Pakistani Taliban, as well as the local chapter of the Islamic State, but mass casualty attacks remain rare.
Moazzam Jah Ansari, the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police force, on Tuesday said a suicide bomber had entered the mosque as a guest, using 1012kg of explosive material earlier brought to the site in bits and pieces. He added that a militant group that was on-and-off affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban could be behind the attack.
It is Pakistan’s deadliest assault in five years and harks back to more than a decade ago, when Peshawar was at the centre of rampant militancy.
Police have said it was a revenge attack against the police force who are on the front line fighting a resurgence in militancy since the Afghan Taliban came to power across the border. –