At least 56 killed in bombing of Shiite mosque in Peshawar

A suicide bomber struck inside a Shiite Muslim mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar during Friday prayers, killing at least 56 worshippers and wounding 194 people, hospital officials said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

According to the spokesman at Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital, Asim Khan, many of the wounded were in critical condition. Scores were peppered with shrapnel, several had limbs amputated and others were injured by flying debris.

Peshawar police Chief Muhammed Ejaz Khan said the violence started when an armed attacker opened fire on police outside the mosque in Peshawar’s old city. One policeman was killed in the gunfight, and another police officer was wounded. The attacker then ran inside the mosque and detonated his suicide vest.

The suicide bomber had strapped a powerful explosive device to his body, packed with 12 pounds of explosives, said Moazzam Jah Ansari, the top police official for Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province, where Peshawar is the capital.

Ansari said the crudely made device was packed with ball bearings, a deadly method of constructing a bomb to inflict the most carnage, spraying a larger area with deadly projectiles. The ball bearings caused the high death toll, Ansari said.

Shayan Haider had been preparing to enter the mosque when a powerful explosion threw him to the ground. “I opened my eyes, and there was dust and bodies everywhere,” he said.

The prayer leader, Allama Irshad Hussein Khalil, a prominent young Shiite leader, was among the dead.

Retired army officer Sher Ali, who had been inside the mosque at the time of the explosion, was injured by flying shrapnel. He made a impassioned plea to the Pakistani government for better protection of the country’s minority Shiites.

“What is our sin? What have we done? Aren’t we citizens of this country?” he said from within the emergency department, his white clothes splattered with blood.

In majority Sunni Pakistan, minority Shiites have come under repeated attacks. Also, in recent months, the country has experienced a significant increase of violence, and dozens of military personnel have been killed in scores of attacks on army outposts along the border with Afghanistan.

MUHAMMAD SAJJAD/AP Rescue workers and volunteers remove a body Friday from the site of a bomb explosion in a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan. The powerful bomb that exploded inside a Shiite Muslim mosque killed scores of worshippers and wounded dozens more, many critically, police said.