ISIS claims Pakistan mosque attack that killed dozens
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A bomb tore through a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, on Friday, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan in several years.
The Islamic State’s regional affiliate, Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, claimed responsibility, according to a translation of an Islamic State statement by the SITE Intelligence Group. The statement said the bombing was carried out by an Afghan suicide bomber.
The Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim terrorist group that considers Shiites heretics, has claimed several previous attacks in Pakistan, but the mosque bombing was the biggest and deadliest yet.
Police officials said at least one gunman on a motorcycle had killed two police guards before entering the mosque and detonating what appeared to be a suicide vest, while another official said there were two attackers.
The attack was one of the deadliest in years to hit Peshawar, a city of roughly 2 million people near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. In 2014, nine Taliban gunmen killed more than 140 people at the Army Public School and Degree College there.
“We are trying to figure out and determine what happened,” Moazzam Jah, the provincial police chief, said Friday.
The Peshawar police chief, Ejaz Khan, said police had recovered pellets, empty bullet cartridges and pieces of the gun used in the initial attacks. He said there appeared to have been two assailants, both of whom had worn and detonated explosives.
Area residents said they heard a huge blast in the main mosque in Kocha Risaldar, a largely Shiite neighborhood that is part of the centuries-old Qissa Khawani Bazaar, a former trading hub.
Rescue workers took the dead and wounded to the city’s main hospital, Lady Reading.
A spokesman for the hospital, Muhammad Asim Khan, said that 10 of those people were “in very critical condition.”
The attack Friday broke a relative lull in violence in Peshawar, which has borne the brunt of Taliban militancy in recent years. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, the interior minister, called the attack an attempt to “disrupt peace and tranquility of the provincial capital,” according to state-run news media.
Shiite groups across the country organized protests in the evening to condemn the attack.
A second mosque attack Friday, in Paktia province in Afghanistan, southwest of Peshawar, killed at least three people and wounded more than two dozen after an explosive device was detonated, according to a Taliban spokesman.