The death toll in a suicide attack on a mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar has reached 100, medical officials say. “So far, 100 bodies have been taken to Lady Reading Hospital,” a spokesman for the largest medical facility in the city, Mohammad Asim, said in a statement on Tuesday.
The roof of the mosque, which was located inside a government security compound, collapsed in the bombing, and rescuers had to remove mounds of debris to recover many of the bodies, authorities said. KP Inspector General Mauzzam Jah Ansari stated during a media briefing that the caretaker chief minister of the province Azam Khan had ordered a joint investigation team (JIT) to immediately investigate the deadly attack, local media Dawn reported. The attack is the deadliest in Peshawar in a decade and was carried out during a surge in violence against the police.
Shortly after the explosion, Omar Mukaram Khorasani – head of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a TTP splinter group and a member of the TTP’s leadership council – said his group committed the attack in retaliation for the killing last year of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar’s former leader Omar Khalid Khorasani in Afghanistan, according to the Long War Journal and the South Asia Media Research Institute. Khorasani “took responsibility, saying this was a revenge attack for the killing of his brother in Afghanistan, which he blamed on the Pakistani security forces”, Hyder said. “This is a splinter group, and they joined the mainstream TTP back in 2020, so definitely a group within the TTP.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called the recent bombings targeting houses of worship “particularly abhorrent” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. The attack comes at a time when financially strapped Pakistan continues to face a severe economic crisis. Requested $1.1 billion in installments to avoid default from the International Monetary Fund. It’s part of a $6 billion bailout package. But negotiations with the IMF have stalled in recent months.
