In one of the deadliest attacks in years, a suicide bomber killed at least 31 people during an attack on a Shi’ite Muslim mosque in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, as it observed Friday Prayers.
Officials said the February 6 bombing also wounded some 170 worshippers in Tarlai, a suburb of Islamabad. Mosques across the Muslim world are crowded during Friday Prayers.
Video footage from the immediate aftermath of the attack showed bodies lying on the mosque floor amid debris. Scores of wounded were lying on the lawns of the Khadija Tul Kubra Imambargah mosque.
"A total of 31 people have lost their lives. The number of wounded brought to hospitals has risen to 169," Irfan Memon, the deputy commissioner, a senior civilian administrator, said in a statement.
Aun Shah, an eyewitness, said two attackers first shot dead the security guards of the mosque. He said some worshippers attempted to stop them by running towards them.
“As soon as [the attackers] reached the gate, one of them detonated his [explosive-laden] belt,” he told RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal.
Some of the worshippers later protested outside the mosque. They questioned their government’s inability to prevent rising terrorist attacks.
"Your security should have been present before the Friday Prayers,” said one worshipper. “But there was no security here during the prayers.”
Attacks in the heavily guarded Islamabad are rare. But Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southwestern Balochistan provinces have been hit by increasingly violent Islamist and nationalist insurgencies, which pit the Pakistani Taliban and secular ethnic Baluch separatists against Pakistani security forces.
The attack follows the largest attack in Balochistan in more than two decades last week.
While no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, conflict monitor ACLED said it "bears the hallmarks of the Islamic State" terrorist group. ACLED declared it the deadliest attack in Islamabad in a decade.
In the Sunni majority nation of 240 million people, Shi’ites make up to 15 percent of the population. Since the 1980s, thousands have been killed in sectarian violence that has often seen Shi’ites targeted by Sunni extremists.
