At least 56 people were on Friday killed and 194 injured by a suicide bomb at a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the deadliest attack in the country since 2018.
The blast — claimed by the Islamic State group — tore through the Kocha Risaldar area of the city in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province moments before Friday prayers were to start, shattering the interior and showering the streets with broken glass.
It came on the first day of a cricket Test match in Rawalpindi — about 190km to the east — between Pakistan and Australia, who have not toured the country in nearly a quarter of a century because of security concerns.
Photo: AP
Muhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital, said that the death toll had climbed to 56, the deadliest since a July 2018 blast — claimed by the local chapter of the Islamic State group — killed 149 people at an election rally.
He said 50 of the injured were in critical condition.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Government spokesman Muhammad Ali Saif told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the blast was a suicide attack, and numerous witnesses recounted the moment of detonation.
Photo: AFP
Ali Asghar said he saw a man enter the mosque before Friday prayers and open fire with a pistol, picking out the worshipers “one-by-one.”
He “then blew himself up,” Asghar said.
“I saw a man firing at two policemen before he entered the mosque. Seconds later, I heard a big bang,” said another witness, Zahid Khan.
The head of Peshawar’s bomb disposal unit, Rab Nawaz Khan, told AFP that the attacker detonated 5kg to 8kg of “highly explosive” trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT, packed with ball bearings to amplify the damage.
An AFP reporter saw body parts strewn at the blast site, where desperate family members were held back by police.
Peshawar Police Chief Muhammad Ijaz Khan told AFP that two attackers were involved.
He said two police officers were shot at the entrance of the mosque.
“One policeman died on the spot while the other was critically injured,” he said.
The hospital spokesman said an emergency was declared at area hospitals, as the injured were brought in.
The Islamic State group said on its Amaq propaganda Web site that one of its fighters had “succeeded in assaulting a Shiite mosque in Peshawar.”
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote on Twitter that he was “personally monitoring operations” and that his administration had “all info regarding origins of where the terrorists came from.”
The authorities were “going after them with full force,” he added.
Sunni-majority Pakistan has over the past few years been battling a resurgence of its domestic chapter of the Taliban, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
A one-month truce last year failed to hold, and there are fears the TTP, which has targeted Shiite Muslims in the past, has been emboldened by the success of the Afghan Taliban.
Shiites in the region have also been targeted by the regional iteration of the Islamic State group, Islamic State-Khorasan.
At least 31 people were killed in a suicide blast at a crowded market in Peshawar in 2018.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.