Death toll from Pakistan mosque bombing rises to 100
Al JazeeraMost of those killed in the suicide bombing in Peshawar were police. The bombing followed “credible intelligence reports” on January 21 that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan planned a wave of attacks in Peshawar and the wider Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Hyder reported. Shortly after the explosion, Omar Mukaram Khorasani – head of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a TTP splinter group and a member of the TTP’s leadership council – said his group committed the attack in retaliation for the killing last year of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar’s former leader Omar Khalid Khorasani in Afghanistan, according to the Long War Journal and the South Asia Media Research Institute. Khorasani “took responsibility, saying this was a revenge attack for the killing of his brother in Afghanistan, which he blamed on the Pakistani security forces”, Hyder said. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the latest bombing “particularly abhorrent” for targeting a place of worship, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.