The death toll from a suicide bombing at a mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar has risen to 100, a medical official says, as the South Asian country faces a mounting security challenge from armed groups.
\u201cSo far, 100 bodies have been brought to Lady Reading Hospital,\u201d the spokesman for the largest medical facility in the city, Mohammad Asim, said in a statement on Tuesday.
The vast majority of those killed in Monday\u2019s bombing were police officers, he said.
Kashif Aftab Abbasi, senior superintendent of police operations in Peshawar, told Al Jazeera that more than 225 people were injured in the blast.
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.
Reporting from Peshawar, Al Jazeera\u2019s Kamal Hyder said the rescue operation had largely shifted to recovery.
\u201cThere has been a ceremonial send-off to those policemen who lost their lives, also funerals taking place across the province, because these policemen came from several districts, so there is mourning across the province,\u201d he said.
The attack is the deadliest in Peshawar in a decade and was carried out during a surge in violence against the police.
Questions are being asked over how an attacker wearing a suicide vest was able to access the heavily fortified area, which includes the headquarters of the provincial police force and a counterterrorism department.
The bombing followed \u201ccredible intelligence reports\u201d on January 21 that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) planned a wave of attacks in Peshawar and the wider Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Hyder reported.
Shortly after the explosion, Omar Mukaram Khorasani \u2013 head of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a TTP splinter group and a member of the TTP\u2019s leadership council \u2013 said his group committed the attack in retaliation for the killing last year of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar\u2019s former leader Omar Khalid Khorasani in Afghanistan, according to the Long War Journal and the South Asia Media Research Institute.
Khorasani \u201ctook responsibility, saying this was a revenge attack for the killing of his brother in Afghanistan, which he blamed on the Pakistani security forces\u201d, Hyder said. \u201cThis is a splinter group, and they joined the mainstream TTP back in 2020, so definitely a group within the TTP.\u201d
Nevertheless, TTP spokesman Mohammad Khorasani distanced the group from the bombing, saying it was not its policy to target mosques, seminaries and other religious sites. He added that those taking part in such acts could face punitive action by the TTP, but he did not address Khorasani\u2019s claims.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Ghulam Ali said an investigation was under way to determine \u201chow the terrorist entered the mosque\u201d in the provincial capital.
\u201cYes, it was a security lapse,\u201d he said.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised to take \u201cstern action\u201d against those behind the attack as he visited a hospital in Peshawar on Monday.
\u201cThe sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. This is no less than an attack on Pakistan,\u201d he tweeted. He expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, saying their pain \u201ccannot be described in words\u201d.
Pakistan has seen a surge in attacks since November when the TTP ended a ceasefire with the government.
In early January, the TTP said one of its members shot and killed two intelligence officers, including the director of the counterterrorism wing of the military\u2019s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. Security officials said on Monday that the gunman in that attack was traced and killed in a shootout in northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border.
The TTP is a separate group from the Afghan Taliban, but they are close allies.
The TTP has waged a 15-year uprising against the Pakistani government, which included a 2014 attack by a faction of the group on an army-run school in Peshawar, which killed 154 people, mostly children.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the latest bombing \u201cparticularly abhorrent\u201d for targeting a place of worship, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The attack occurred as cash-strapped Pakistan continues to face a severe economic crisis. It has sought an instalment of $1.1bn from the International Monetary Fund \u2013 part of its $6bn bailout package \u2013 to avoid default. However, talks with the IMF have stalled in recent months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The death toll from a suicide bombing at a mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar has risen to 100, a medical official says, as the South Asian country faces a mounting security challenge from armed groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":14002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c59-islamic-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n