Death toll from Pakistan mosque bombing rises to 100

Al Jazeera :
The death toll from Monday’s suicide bombing at a mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar has risen to 100, according to a medical official, as the South Asian country faces a mounting security challenge from armed groups.
“So far, 100 bodies have been brought to Lady Reading Hospital,” the spokesman for the largest medical facility in the city, Mohammad Asim, said in a statement on Tuesday.
The vast majority of those killed were police officers, he said.
Kashif Aftab Abbasi, senior superintendent of police operations in Peshawar, told Al Jazeera earlier in the day that more than 225 people were also injured in the blast a day earlier.
The suicide bombing caused the roof of the mosque to collapse, and rescuers had to remove mounds of debris to recover many of the bodies, authorities said.
Reporting from Peshawar, Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder said that the rescue operation had largely shifted to recovery.
“There 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,” he said.
The attack is the deadliest in Peshawar in a decade and comes amid a surge in violence against the police.
Meanwhile, questions have grown over how the attacker was able to access the heavily fortified area, which includes the headquarters of the provincial police force and a counterterrorism department, while wearing a suicide vest. That followed “credible intelligence reports” 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, the current head of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), 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 Jamaat-ul-Ahrar 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.”
Nevertheless, TTP spokesperson Mohammad Khorasani distanced the group from the bombing, saying it was not its policy to target mosques, seminaries and religious places. He added that those taking part in such acts could face punitive action under TTP’s policy, but did not address Khorasani’s claims.
Ghulam Ali, the provincial governor in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said an investigation was under way to determine “how the terrorist entered the mosque”.
“Yes, it was a security lapse,” he added.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited a hospital in Peshawar on Monday and promised to take “stern action” against those behind the attack.
“The sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. This is no less than an attack on Pakistan,” he tweeted. He expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, saying their pain “cannot be described in words”.
Pakistan has seen a surge in attacks since November when the TTP ended a ceasefire with the government.
Rescuers search through the rubble of a mosque in Peshawar after it was hit by a suicide bombing
Rescuers search through the rubble of the mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan [Abid Hussain/Al Jazeera]
In early January, the TTP claimed one of its members shot and killed two intelligence officers, including the director of the counterterrorism wing of the country’s military-based spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence. Security officials said on Monday the gunman in that attack was traced and killed in a shootout in the northwest of the country, near the Afghan border.
While a separate group, the TTP is a close ally of the Afghan Taliban.