PESHAWAR (AFP) – The suicide bomber who killed 84 people inside a mosque at a police headquarters in Pakistan was wearing a uniform and helmet when he staged the attack, a police chief said yesterday.
Hundreds of police were attending afternoon prayers in what should have been a tightly controlled compound in the northwest city of Peshawar on Monday when the blast erupted, causing a wall to collapse and crush officers.
“Those on duty didn’t check him because he was in a police uniform… It was a security lapse,” the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police force Moazzam Jah Ansari told a news conference.
Police have a “fair idea” about who the bomber was after matching his head found at the scene with CCTV images. “There’s an entire network behind him,” Ansari said, explaining that the bomber had not planned the assault alone.
Authorities are investigating how a major breach could happen in one of the most sensitive areas of the city, which houses intelligence and counter-terrorism bureaus and is next door to the regional secretariat.
It is Pakistan’s deadliest assault in several years and the worst since violence began to resurge in the region after the Afghan Taleban takeover in Kabul in 2021.
Authorities are also investigating the possibility that people inside the compound helped to coordinate the attack, a senior city police official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Wednesday.
“We have detained people from the police line (headquarters) to get to the bottom of how the explosive material made its way in and to see if any police officials were also involved in the attack,” he told AFP.
The police official said at least 23 people had been detained, including some from the nearby former tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
