No fewer than 30 people were confirmed dead and about 80 others severely wounded following a suicide attack at a Shiite mosque on Friday in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, where rescuers frantically ferried the dead and wounded from the scene.
One witness saw the attacker narrated that he entered the mosque before Friday prayers and went on to open ‘fire with a pistol’, picking out the worshippers ‘one-by-one’.
The eyewitness who identified himself as Ali Asghar further revealed that the suicide attacker ‘then blew himself up’ after the killings.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the attack is coming on the first day of a cricket Test match in Rawalpindi — around 190 kilometres (120 miles) to the east — between Pakistan and Australia, who haven’t toured the country in nearly a quarter of a century because of security concerns.
Muhammad Ali Saif, a spokesman for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, told reporters that ‘more than 30’ were killed and some 80 others wounded in the blast near Peshawar’s Kocha Risaldar, a similar distance west of the capital Islamabad.
‘It was a suicide attack,’ he added.
Peshawar police chief Muhammad Ijaz Khan told reporters that the death toll could be higher than 30 and that at least two attackers were involved.
He said two police officers were shot at the entrance of the mosque.
‘One policeman died on the spot while the other was critically injured,’ he said.
Muhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital said ‘we have declared an emergency at the hospitals and more injured are being brought’.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Prime Minister Imran Khan’s office on Friday ‘strongly condemned’ the attack.
Africa Today News, New York can confirm that so far, no group has claimed responsibility for the apparent suicide bombing.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK