According to police and rescue personnel, a massive explosion at a mosque in Peshawar’s guarded Police Lines neighbourhood has left at least 28 worshippers dead and 150 more injured.
According to authorities, the explosion happened at around 1:40 pm during afternoon prayers, and police and army officials were allegedly present inside the mosque at the time.
An AFP correspondent observed that part of the mosque’s ceiling and wall had collapsed, and that bloodied survivors were dragging themselves from the rubble while the dead were being taken away in ambulances.
Only ambulances are permitted to enter the cordoned-off area, which has been sealed off because the explosion’s source is still unknown.
Police are currently looking into whether a bomb was planted in the mosque or if it was a suicide attack.
“It’s an emergency situation,” Muhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, told AFP.
According to authorities, several worshippers were still trapped inside. In a hasty rescue effort, heavy equipment and fire brigades were searching the wreckage for survivors.
Police reported that the second row of worshippers was the source of the explosion, and bomb squads are looking into the potential of a suicide attack.
Roads leading to the Red Zone neighbourhood of Islamabad, which is home to diplomatic and government facilities, have been shut down in the meanwhile.
The deadliest terrorist assault in Pakistan since 2018 occurred in March when a suspected Islamic State bomber targeted a Shi’ite mosque in Peshawar, killing 64 people.
Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has its base in Afghanistan, is also present there.TTP behind today’s Peshawar attack.
Islamabad has charged the Taliban with failing to protect their mountainous border since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, letting fighters to move back and forth to stage operations and evade capture.
According to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, militant assaults in Pakistan increased by 50% during the first year of the Taliban’s control in Afghanistan, with an emphasis on the western border districts (PIPS).
According to detectives, the Peshawar bomber from March 2022 was an Afghan expatriate who had come home to prepare for the attack.
“A brother of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) slain commander Umar Khalid Khurasani claimed that today’s suicide attack in Peshawar that targeted police is part of the revenge attacks series for his brother who was killed last August in Afghanistan”, the statement reads.
TTP behind today’s Peshawar attack. The TTP also carried out a massacre in Peshawar in 2014, raiding a school for children of army personnel and killing around 150 people, the majority of them children.
