The attack took place during Friday prayers. There are nearly 200 injured.
At least 56 people were killed and 194 injured during Friday prayers on March 4 in a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan, official sources have learned.
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“A total of 56 people died and 194 injured. The injured include 50 patients in critical conditionMuhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, told AFP. The explosion occurred minutes before the start of the weekly high prayer at a Shia mosque on a narrow street in the Kocha Risaldar district, near the historic Qissa Khwani bazaar. “It was a suicide attack“, told AFP Muhammad Ali Saif, spokesman for the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital. Peshawar police chief Muhammad Ijaz Khan told AFP the death toll could rise further. “Two assailants fired on the police at the main entrance to the mosque. One police officer was killed instantly and the other was seriously injured.“, he explained.
“I was just outside the mosque when I saw a man shoot two policemen before entering the mosque. Seconds later I heard a loud bangsaid one resident, Zahid Khan. Another witness, Ali Asghar, said he saw a man “open fire with a pistolinside the mosque, andkill people one by one and then blow themselves up“. The head of the Peshawar demining unit, Rab Nawaz Khan, told AFP that five to eight kg of “High Explosive TNTpacked with ball bearings to amplify the damage, had been used.
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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. At Lady Reading Hospital, this reporter saw dozens of wounded being brought in by rescue workers. Inside the hospital, the stretchers were bloody and scores of women were rushing in tears to the various wards looking for relatives. “We have declared an emergency in the hospitals and more wounded are being brought insaid Muhammad Asim Khan, spokesperson for Lady Reading Hospital. Prime Minister Imran Khan hasfirmly condemnedthe attack, according to one of these spokespersons.
The comeback of the TTP
Peshawar, located about fifty kilometers from the border with Afghanistan, had been ravaged by almost daily attacks during the first half of the 2010s, but security had greatly improved there in recent years. The last attack of such magnitude took place there in November 2018, when at least 31 people were killed in a suicide attack at a city market. In recent months, Peshawar had mostly seen targeted attacks targeting mainly 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. The TTP, a movement distinct from that of the new Afghan leaders but which shares common roots with it, has claimed responsibility for several attacks since the beginning of the year.
One of the worst atrocities committed by the TTP, which left a lasting mark on the Pakistani national consciousness, was the massacre of around 150 people, mainly schoolchildren, in Peshawar in December 2014. A military operation launched by the Pakistani army in 2014 enabled the TTP to be driven out of the tribal areas, located on the border with Afghanistan. But it recovered from the summer of 2020 and has since multiplied attacks in Pakistan, however less deadly than in the past and mainly against the security forces.
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Shiites in Pakistan have also been targeted by the Islamic State group in the past. Its regional branch, the Islamic State-Khorasan (EI-K), has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks in the country in recent years, such as the assassination in early 2021 of ten Hazara minors, an ethnic Shiite group, in the province of Balochistan. (South West). Shia Hazaras, a minority in a predominantly Sunni country, are regularly victims of attacks by Sunni Islamists, who consider them heretics.
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