At least 56 people have been killed and 194 injured in a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group carried out during Friday prayers at a Shia mosque in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan, a country that is not had not seen such a deadly attack since 2018.
Hazara Shiites, a minority in a predominantly Sunni country, are regularly victims of attacks by Sunni Islamists, who consider them heretics.
The blast occurred minutes before the start of the weekly high prayer at the mosque, located on a narrow street in the Kocha Risaldar district, near the historic Qissa Khwani bazaar.
“A total of 56 people died and 194 were injured. The injured include 50 patients in critical condition,” Muhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told AFP.
This is the deadliest attack in Pakistan since the attack in July 2018 targeting an electoral meeting in Mastung, in the province of Balochistan (southwest), which had killed 149 people and had been claimed by the EI group.
A “hate crime”
“Two assailants shot at the police at the main entrance to the mosque. One policeman died instantly and the other was seriously injured,” Peshawar police chief Muhammad Ijaz Khan told AFP.
“I was just outside the mosque when I saw a man shoot two policemen before entering the mosque. A few seconds later, I heard a big bang,” said resident Zahid Khan.
Another witness, Ali Asghar, said he saw a man “open fire with a pistol” inside the mosque, and “kill people one by one and then blow himself up”. The head of the Peshawar demining unit, Rab Nawaz Khan, told AFP that five to eight kilos of “high-explosive TNT”, packed with ball bearings to amplify the damage, had been used. 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 injured people being brought in by rescue workers. Inside the hospital, the stretchers were bloody, and scores of women rushed in tears to the various wards looking for relatives.
In the evening, the IS group claimed responsibility for the attack, the jihadist organization’s Amaq propaganda agency said. “A suicide bomber from the Islamic State group managed to enter a Shiite mosque in Peshawar today, after shooting two Pakistani police guarding it, killing one and injuring the second,” a statement said. the agency broadcast on social networks. He then “detonated an explosive belt in the middle of the Shiites”.
Prime Minister Imran Khan had previously “strongly condemned” the attack. On Twitter on Friday, he said he “personally follows the operations”, adding that the government has “all the information concerning the origin of the terrorists” and “will concentrate all its forces to pursue them”.
Denouncing “a hate crime” against “civilians practicing their faith”, the European Union called on Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of the attack to justice.
Return of the Pakistani Taliban
Peshawar, a city located about fifty kilometers from the border with Afghanistan, was ravaged by almost daily attacks during the first half of the 2010s, but security had greatly improved there in recent years.
In recent months, the city had mainly experienced targeted attacks aimed first at the security forces. Shias in Pakistan have been targeted by the Islamic State group in the past. Its regional branch, the Islamic State-Khorasan (EI-K) group, has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks in the country in recent years, such as the assassination in early 2021 of 10 Hazara minors, an ethnic Shiite group, in Balochistan.
In addition, Pakistan has been facing for several months the return in force of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban, galvanized by the coming to power of the Afghan 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.