PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — The death toll from a suicide bombing at a mosque in northwestern Pakistan rose to 90, a local official said Tuesday, a day after one of the worst attacks in months in the southern nation. from Asia with liquidity problems.
Shafiullah Khan, deputy city commissioner of Peshawar, where the attack occurred on Monday, said another 177 people, most of them police officers, were injured and 57 of them were still hospitalized, some in critical condition.
Authorities said the attacker was standing in the front row of the crowded mosque when he detonated his explosive vest during evening prayer, causing the roof to collapse. which is within a walled compound that contains the police headquarters.
About 300 worshipers were in the mosque at the time of the blast, said Ijaz Khan, Peshawar’s police chief.
“Part of the building has collapsed and some of the people are alive but stranded there,” he said Monday. “Our teams are dedicated to cutting through the steel to recover them.”
It was unclear how the attacker was able to get past security at the compound, as well as a larger high-security zone surrounding it. Khan said authorities had confirmed the attacker was not a member of the police force.
Sarbakaf Mohmand, a commander in the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter. But spokesman Mohammad Khurasani later denied the group was involved.
“According to our principles, carrying out attacks on mosques, seminaries and other holy places cannot be defended and the perpetrators can be punished,” he said in a statement. He did not address the TTP commander’s earlier liability claim.
The Pakistani Taliban, which is separate from but closely allied with the Afghan Taliban, has carried out an insurgency in Pakistan for the past 15 years. They are especially active in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province bordering Afghanistan, where Peshawar is the capital.
Attacks by militants in Pakistan, particularly against security forces and police, have increased since November, when the Pakistani Taliban ended a months-long ceasefire with the government.
The Peshawar mosque bombing has been widely condemned both in Pakistan and internationally.
“The magnitude of the human tragedy is unimaginable”, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Twitter. “This is no less than an attack on Pakistan.”
The attack on the mosque is at least the third disaster in Pakistan since Sunday. A bus accident killed more than 40 people in the southern province of Balochistan and 30 students were killed when their boat capsized in a lake in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government declared Tuesday a day of mourning for those killed in the mosque attack and boat accident.
Tuesday also marks the start of talks in Islamabad, the capital, between government officials and the International Monetary Fund on reviving a $1.1 billion loan program. Pakistan, a heavily indebted country of more than 230 million people, is facing an economic crisis made worse by catastrophic floods last summer, with its currency, the rupee, falling dangerously low.
Last week, a power grid failure left much of the country without power for most of the day during the coldest time of the year. Officials said they would upgrade the network to reduce the number of blackouts, which occur regularly.
