The death toll from a suicide bombing on a packed mosque in northwest Pakistan has risen to 68, officials said yesterday, and four others died in a second attack nearby in Pakistan’s militant Islamist-infested northwest.
The country’s deadliest attack in two months, on the front line of the US-led war on al-Qaeda, saw the mosque reduced to blood-spattered rubble strewn with body parts as a huge explosion ripped through Friday prayers.
“Sixty-eight people are now confirmed dead in the bombing,” top local administration official Shahidullah said.
The official said the death toll might rise after many people took away the bodies of their loved ones from the site of the attack so those were not included in the grim counting process.
Police officials confirmed the rise in the death toll.
The blast was followed hours later by a grenade assault on a second mosque in the same area, which killed at least four people.
Dozens were critically wounded and officials fear the toll from both attacks could rise.
The first explosion turned worship into a bloodbath in Akhurwall village, part of the semi-tribal northwest area of Darra Adam Khel, about 140km west of the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Eleven children were among the dead, said a local official.
Only one wall was left standing and the concrete roof collapsed, leaving bloodstains, human remains and hair scattered in the debris.
Houses near the mosque were also damaged, including that of Wali Mohammad, the leader of a pro-government militia that had clashed repeatedly with local Taliban militants until reportedly cutting a deal earlier this year.
Although the Taliban denied responsibility, a local elder blamed the group, suggesting it could have been acting to punish Mohammad’s militia.
Witnesses said the bomber walked into the mosque and shouted Allahu akbar (“God is the greatest”) before a deafening explosion.
Dilawar Gul, 30, said he was collecting donations from worshipers when he heard the suicide bomber shout.
“Then I heard a huge blast, which flung me to part of the mosque where the roof didn’t collapse, and I survived,” Gul said.
Local elder Sohbat Khan Afridi blamed the Taliban, saying Mohammad, who formed his tribal militia in 2007 to fight the militants, has a house close to the mosque, although he is understood to live in Lahore.
The Taliban and the militia, which is known locally as a lashkar, clashed repeatedly in the area, but this year reached a compromise in which blood money was paid to the Taliban, Afridi said.
But Azam Tariq, spokesman for Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Taliban, denied that the faction was involved. The Taliban routinely deny attacks that kill civilians but have been blamed for some of the country’s most devastating bombings.
At least four more people were killed and 14 others wounded when hand grenades were thrown into a mosque in the second attack 20km away, a hospital official said.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon, the EU and the US condemned the attacks, with Washington saying they had “brutally targeted innocent people” at places of worship.
Ban Ki-moon “is dismayed by the indiscriminate killing of civilians in a place of worship, which no cause can justify,” his spokesman said.
Around 3,800 people have been killed in suicide attacks and bombings, blamed on homegrown Taliban and other Islamist extremist networks, since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad three years ago.
Friday’s bombing was the deadliest in Pakistan since a suicide attacker slaughtered 60 people at a Shiite Muslim rally in the southwestern city of Quetta on Sept. 3.
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