At least 44 people were killed and close to 200 were injured when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a political gathering in northwest Pakistan, according to officials.
On the outskirts of Khar in Pakistan’s northwest Bajaur district, which borders Afghanistan, the fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) party gathering was where the explosion occurred on Sunday.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
The suicide bomber detonated his explosives vest close to the platform where numerous top party leaders were seated, according to a statement from the provincial police. Initial investigations indicated that the ISIL (ISIS) group may have been responsible for the attack, and it was stated that police were still looking into it.
Following the overthrow of President Ashraf Ghani’s administration, the armed group has been active in the neighboring Afghani country. Its members are known to cross the permeable mountain border and take cover in the Peshawar region, where it fights the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
According to Feroz Jamal, the provincial information minister, 44 people have already been “martyred” and close to 200 have been hurt in the attack.
According to district police official Nazir Khan, an emergency has been declared in the hospitals in Bajaur and the surrounding districts where the majority of the injured were transported. Military helicopters flew the critically injured from Bajaur to hospitals in Peshawar, the provincial capital.
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Adam Khan, 45, was knocked to the ground by the blast and had splinters in his knee and both hands in addition to being covered in injured people from which he could scarcely stand. “There was dust and smoke around, and I was under some injured people from where I could hardly stand up, only to see chaos and some scattered limbs,” he recalled.
According to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s inspector general of police Akhtar Hayat Gandapur, senior party leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman was not present at the event when the explosion occurred.
JUI-F is a member of the Pakistan Democratic Alliance, a grouping of politicians connected to the administration in which Rehman is a key figure.
A state of deep sorrow
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According to Radio Pakistan, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif harshly denounced the incident and expressed his sympathies to the families of the victims, including JUI-F leader Ziaullah Jan, who was confirmed dead in the attack.
According to a statement from his Pakistan Peoples Party, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari “expressed deep sorrow over the loss of precious lives”. “The terrorists, their facilitators and planners need to be eliminated so that peace is established in the country” he added.
Social media user Marriyum Aurangzeb claimed that the “religion of terrorists is only terrorism” Ending terrorism is crucial for Pakistan’s survival and integrity, she added.
Deadliest bombing in Pakistan
One of the four deadliest bombings in northwest Pakistan since 147 people, mostly pupils, were murdered in a Taliban attack on an army-run school in Peshawar in 2014, occurred on Sunday. A Peshawar mosque was bombed in January, killing 74 people. More than 100 people were killed in an explosion at a mosque inside a high-security complex housing the Peshawar police headquarters in February, the most of them police officers.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also referred to as the Pakistan Taliban and associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan, dissociated themselves from the attack on Sunday.
The TTP has been fighting the government of Pakistan for more than ten years, calling for the implementation of Islamic law, the release of important members who have been detained by the authorities, and the undoing of the merger of Pakistan’s tribal regions with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The Afghan Taliban’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, also denounced the most recent bombing. He wrote in a message on the social media website X, formerly known as Twitter, “Such crimes cannot in any way be justified.”
According to Nizam Salarzai, a journalist for the independent news source The Khorasan Diary, the ISIL (ISIS) group has been attacking the JUI-F during the previous two years.
Salarzai stated, “They have a problem with the Afghan Taliban as well as anyone who supports Taliban sentiments.”
He continued, “it may mean that the Pakistani state will have to fight on multiple fronts” to avert such assaults in the future if ISIL (ISIS) were out to be the group responsible for the attack.
The attack, according to Abdul Rasheed, the party’s regional chief, was an effort to eliminate JUI-F from the scene prior to the November legislative elections, but he claimed that such strategies would not succeed.
“In this tragedy, several of our comrades died and many more were injured. I’ll ask the federal and provincial governments to look into this situation thoroughly and offer the affected people the appropriate compensation and medical care.
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