Pakistani police have arrested 23 suspects as part of the investigation into the attack that killed 101 people on Monday at a mosque within the Peshawar police headquarters, a police official told AFP on Wednesday. who requested anonymity. Police are also exploring the possibility that people inside the perimeter of the headquarters may have helped coordinate the attack, the police official from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital, added.
Police involved?
“We arrested people from the police (headquarters) to investigate how the explosive material could have been brought inside and whether any police were involved in the attack.e,” said the official. “The author (of the attack) and the facilitators may have had links outside Pakistan”, according to him. Among the 23 people arrested, some are from Peshawar and others from the former tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, located in the Peshawar region.
Police are investigating how a major security breach could have occurred at one of the city’s most tightly guarded compounds, the police headquarters housing the intelligence and counter-terrorism services, among others. . Attacks by insurgents against patrols, checkpoints or police stations have increased in Peshawar, located about 50 kilometers from the border with Afghanistan, and in the former tribal areas around, since the return of the Taliban in power in Kabul in August 2021.
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They are claimed mainly by the Pakistani Taliban as well as by local cells of the Islamic State, but large-scale attacks causing many victims are rare. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police chief Moazzam Jah Ansari told reporters on Tuesday that a suicide bomber had managed to enter the mosque as a guest, carrying 10 to 12 kg of explosives in small pieces. . According to him, an insurgent organization affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban could be behind this attack.