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A suicide bomb blast at an Islamic seminary in Pakistan’s restive northwest killed a outstanding cleric and 4 different folks throughout Friday prayers.
The blast occurred only a day earlier than the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan at a seminary generally known as a historic coaching floor for the Afghan Taliban in Akora Khattak in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, district police chief Abdul Rashid mentioned.
Greater than a dozen folks injured within the assault had been taken to a neighborhood hospital.
Hamid ul Haq, chief of a faction of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam social gathering, was among the many 5 folks killed, the police chief mentioned.
The cleric was the son of Maulana Samiul Haq, “the daddy of the Taliban” who was killed in a knife assault at his house in 2018.
“Hamid ul Haq has been martyred. It seems he was the goal of the suicide bomber,” Mr Rashid advised the information company AFP.
Haq’s household confirmed his loss of life in Friday’s assault and appealed to his followers to stay peaceable. Haq was additionally answerable for the Jamia Haqqania seminary, the place many members of the Afghan Taliban studied over the previous three a long time.
The explosion reportedly passed off within the first row of worshippers simply behind the imam. “It was prayer time, however it’s not clear if it occurred as folks stood for prayer,” native police officer Noor Ali Khan mentioned.
Pakistan‘s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the assault and ordered authorities to offer the very best therapy to the wounded.
Zulfiqar Hameed, the provincial police chief, mentioned Haq was the goal of the bombing. No group instantly claimed duty for the blast.
Tucked away in a dusty Pakistani city off the freeway to the Afghan border, Darul Uloom Haqqania was the launch pad for the Taliban motion within the Nineties and remains to be described as an incubator for radical Islamists.
Pakistan is battling twin insurgencies, one mounted by Islamists and the opposite by ethnic militants in search of secession over what they declare is the federal government’s unfair division of pure sources.
Suicide assaults have been a trademark of those insurgencies. In 2023, as many as 101 folks, principally law enforcement officials, had been killed when a suicide assault focused a mosque in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Authorities have blamed the Pakistani Taliban, formally known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, for many of the earlier suicide assaults. The group has by no means claimed assaults on mosques, saying it doesn’t goal locations of worship. It’s a separate group however an ally of the Afghan Taliban, who seized energy in neighboring Afghanistan in 2021 after the collapse of the earlier authorities backed by US and Nato forces.
In the meantime, a roadside bomb exploded close to a car carrying safety forces within the southwestern Pakistani metropolis of Quetta on Friday, wounding 10 folks, together with two troopers, police mentioned.
Further reporting by companies.
