The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for a devastating bomb blast in Pakistan, Peshawar, that left at least 56 people dead and 194 injured, making it one of the worst terrorist attacks in the country in several years.
Responsibility for the blast was claimed by the Islamic State’s regional affiliate, ISIS-K, as per a translation of an ISIS statement by the SITE Intelligence Group.
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“Dozens of Shiites were killed and wounded in a major suicide bombing that hit their temple in Pakistan,” ISIS said via their mouthpiece, the Amaq News Agency.
The statement added that that an ISIS fighter had stormed the mosque in Peshawar after shooting two Pakistani police officers.
The statement from ISIS comes hours after a massive blast rocked a Shia mosque in the Qissa Khwani bazaar area in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
The ISIS statement also seems to coincide with reports by Pakistani police officials, who said earlier on Friday that at least one gunman on a motorcycle had gunned down two police officers before proceeding with a deadly suicide bombing on the mosque.
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A top police official said that the bomber had been wearing a suicide vest with as much as five kilograms of explosives. Since the explosives also contained shrapnel in the form of ball bearings, the death toll from the blast was significantly higher than that of a normal explosion, police chief Moazzam Jah Ansari of the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province of Peshawar said after the blast.
The deadly blast was one of the worst terrorist attacks to have taken place in Peshawar since 2014, when nine Taliban gunmen stormed the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, and killed more than 150 people, most of them children.