A suicide bomb blast at an Islamic seminary in Pakistan’s restive northwest killed a prominent cleric and four other people during Friday prayers.
The blast occurred just a day before the start of the fasting month of Ramadan at a seminary known as a historic training ground for the Afghan Taliban in Akora Khattak in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, district police chief Abdul Rashid said.
More than a dozen people injured in the attack were taken to a local hospital.
Hamid ul Haq, leader of a faction of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam party, was among the five people killed, the police chief said.
The cleric was the son of Maulana Samiul Haq, “the father of the Taliban” who was killed in a knife attack at his home in 2018.
“Hamid ul Haq has been martyred. It appears he was the target of the suicide bomber,” Mr Rashid told the news agency AFP.
Haq’s family confirmed his death in Friday’s attack and appealed to his followers to remain peaceful. Haq was also in charge of the Jamia Haqqania seminary, where many members of the Afghan Taliban studied over the past three decades.
The explosion reportedly took place in the first row of worshippers just behind the imam. “It was prayer time, but it is not clear if it happened as people stood for prayer,” local police officer Noor Ali Khan said.
Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack and ordered authorities to provide the best possible treatment to the wounded.
Zulfiqar Hameed, the provincial police chief, said Haq was the target of the bombing. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast.
Tucked away in a dusty Pakistani town off the highway to the Afghan border, Darul Uloom Haqqania was the launch pad for the Taliban movement in the 1990s and is still described as an incubator for radical Islamists.
Pakistan is battling twin insurgencies, one mounted by Islamists and the other by ethnic militants seeking secession over what they claim is the government’s unfair division of natural resources.
Suicide attacks have been a hallmark of these insurgencies. In 2023, as many as 101 people, mostly police officers, were killed when a suicide attack targeted a mosque in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Authorities have blamed the Pakistani Taliban, formally called Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, for most of the previous suicide attacks. The group has never claimed attacks on mosques, saying it doesn’t target places of worship. It is a separate group but an ally of the Afghan Taliban, who seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in 2021 after the collapse of the previous government backed by US and Nato forces.
Meanwhile, a roadside bomb exploded near a vehicle carrying security forces in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Friday, wounding 10 people, including two soldiers, police said.
Additional reporting by agencies.
