Pakistan police called the mosque blast a “security lapse”. (file)
Peshawar:
A police chief said on Thursday that a suicide bomber who killed 101 people inside a mosque at a police headquarters in Pakistan was wearing a police uniform and helmet.
Moazzam Jah Ansari, the chief of the police force of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said at a press conference, “The people on duty did not check him because he was in police uniform… It was a lapse in security.”
Police have a “reasonable idea” about who the bomber was after matching his head with CCTV images.
Ansari said, “There is a whole network behind him.”
Hundreds of police were attending afternoon prayers at the mosque at the police headquarters when the explosion occurred, causing a wall to collapse and crushing the officers.
Authorities are investigating how a major security breach could have occurred in one of the city’s most tightly controlled areas, housing the Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Bureau, and next to the regional secretariat.
It is Pakistan’s deadliest attack in several years and the worst since violence resurfaced in the region following the Afghan Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)