Pakistan mosque attack death toll rises to over 80
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: The death toll from a suicide bombing at a Sunni mosque inside a major police facility in northwestern Pakistan has climbed to 88, officials said on Tuesday. The blast is one of the deadliest attacks on the country’s security forces in recent years.
More than 300 worshippers were praying in the mosque in the city of Peshawar when the bomber set off his explosives vest on Monday morning. The blast ripped through the mosque, killing and injuring scores, and also blew off part of the roof.
What was left of the roof then caved in, injuring many more, according to police officer Zafar Khan. Rescuers had to remove mounds of debris to reach worshippers still trapped under the rubble.
More bodies were retrieved from the rubble overnight and on Tuesday morning, said Mohammad Asim, a government hospital spokesman in Peshawar, and several of those critically injured died in the hospital.
“Most of them were policemen,” Asim said of the victims.
Bilal Faizi, the chief rescue official, said rescue teams were still working on Tuesday at the site of the mosque — located inside a police compound in a high-security zone of the city — as more people are believed trapped inside after the roof caved in.
The bombing also wounded more than 150 people, he added. It was not clear how the bomber was able to slip into the walled compound in a high-security zone with other government buildings.
Also on Tuesday, mourners were burying the bombing victims at different graveyards in Peshawar and elsewhere.
Authorities have not determined who was behind the bombing. Shortly after the explosion, Sarbakaf Mohmand, a commander of the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, claimed responsibility for it in a Twitter post.
But TTP spokesman Mohammad Khurasani later distanced the group from the bombing, saying it was not its policy to target mosques, seminaries and religious places. He added that those taking part in such acts could face punitive action under the TTP’s policy. His statement did not address why the commander had claimed responsibility.
“The sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. This is no less than an attack on Pakistan,” tweeted Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, who visited the wounded in
Peshawar and vowed “stern action” against those behind the bombing.
The South Asian country, which is mostly Sunni Muslim, has seen a surge in militant attacks since last November, when the Pakistani Taliban ended their ceasefire with government forces.
Earlier this month, the Pakistani Taliban claimed that one of its members shot and killed two intelligence officers, including the director of the counterterrorism wing of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s military-based spy agency. Security officials said on Monday the gunman was traced and killed in a shootout in the northwest, near the Afghan border.
The TTP has waged an insurgency in Pakistan in the past 15 years, seeking stricter enforcement of Islamic laws, the release of its members in state custody and a reduction of Pakistani military presence in areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — of which Peshawar is the capital — it has long used as its base. The group has a strong presence there, and the city has been the scene of frequent military attacks.
The TTP is separate from, but a close ally of, the Afghan Taliban, which seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021 as the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops pulled out of the country after 20 years of war.
Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was “saddened to learn that numerous people lost their lives and many others were injured by an explosion at a mosque in Peshawar” and condemned attacks on worshippers as contrary to the teachings of Islam.
Islamabad’s truce with the TTP ended as the country was still contending with unprecedented flooding that killed 1,739 people, destroyed more than 2 million homes, and at one point submerged as much as a third of the country.