At least 56 people were killed and 194 injured during Friday prayers in a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, northwest Pakistan. The country had not seen such a deadly attack since 2018. The explosion occurred minutes before the start of the weekly high prayer at a mosque located on a narrow street in the Kocha Risaldar district, near the historic bazaar. Qissa Khwani.
“A total of 56 people died and 194 injured. The injured include 50 patients in critical condition,” said Muhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar. Two assailants fired on the police at the main entrance to the mosque. One officer died instantly and the other was seriously injured, according to local police.
No claim
A witness, Ali Asghar, said he saw a man “opening fire with a pistol” inside the mosque, and “killing people one by one and then blowing himself up”. An AFP journalist saw dismembered bodies at the scene, while the emergency services and residents worked to help the victims by carrying them on their shoulders. “We have declared an emergency in the hospitals and more injured people are being brought in,” said Muhammad Asim Khan, spokesman for Lady Reading Hospital.
According to one of his spokespersons, Prime Minister Imran Khan “strongly condemned” the attack, which has not yet been claimed. Peshawar, about 50 kilometers from the border with Afghanistan, had been ravaged by almost daily attacks during the first half of the 2010s, but security there had improved greatly in recent years.
The last such deadly attack in Pakistan took place in November 2018, when at least 31 people were killed in a suicide attack at a market in Kalaya, about 50 km southwest of Peshawar. In recent months, Peshawar had mostly seen targeted attacks primarily targeting security forces. Pakistan has been confronted for some time with the return in force of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban, galvanized by the coming to power of the Taliban in August in Afghanistan.