At least 56 people were killed and 194 injured in a suicide bombing during Friday prayers at a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, northwest Pakistan, it said on Friday (March 4th).

The country had not seen such a deadly attack since 2018.

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 are dead and 194 injured. The injured include 50 patients in critical condition," Muhammad Asim Khan, a spokesman for Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, the provincial capital, told AFP. of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

"Two assailants shot at the police officers at the main entrance of the mosque. One officer died instantly and the other was seriously injured," Peshawar police chief Muhammad Ijaz told AFP. Khan.

"I was just outside the mosque when I saw a man shoot two policemen before entering the mosque. Seconds later I heard a loud bang," said resident Zahid. Khan.

Another witness, Ali Asghar, said he saw a man "opening fire with a pistol" inside the mosque, and "killing people one by one and then blowing himself up".

Hazara Shiites, a minority in a predominantly Sunni country, are regularly victims of attacks by Sunni Islamists, who consider them heretics.

Peshawar, 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.

The comeback of the TTP

Pakistan has been confronted for several months with 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.

Born in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan, the TTP has killed tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and members of the security forces in less than a decade.

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One of his worst atrocities, which left a lasting mark on Pakistan's national consciousness, was the massacre of around 150 people, mostly schoolchildren, in Peshawar in December 2014.

A military operation launched by the Pakistani army in 2014 succeeded in driving the TTP out of the tribal areas.

But it recovered from the summer of 2020 and has since multiplied attacks in Pakistan, however less deadly than in the past and mainly targeting the security forces.

Shiites in Pakistan have also in the past been targeted by the Islamic State group.

Its regional branch, the Islamic State-Khorasan (EI-K), has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks in the country in recent years, such as the assassination in early 2021 of ten Hazara minors, an ethnic Shiite group, in Balochistan.

This is the deadliest attack in Pakistan since the attack in July 2018 targeting an election rally in Mastung, in the province of Balochistan (southwest).

It had killed 149 people and had been claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group. 

With AFP

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