Peshawar: A blast, apparently suicide attack, killed at least ten persons and injured 23 more at the door of an Imam Bargah at Kohati, Peshawar city as the Moharram, special worship days for Shiites, is about to start.
Pakistani Interior Ministry has confirmed it was a suicide attack while eyewitnesses had seen many injured persons being evacuated to the Lady Reading Hospital.
The government had claimed a few days ago it had taken extra measures for security during Moharram. Usually Shiite-Sunni violence erupts in many areas of the country during Moharram. At least 200 people have been already killed in this violence which is on-going from past two months in Para Chinar area. Also a known Officer of Peshawar Police, Malak Saad, and many others were killed in a suicide attack during last Moharram.
Related to this: The History of Suicide Attacks in Pakistan
Meanwhile, the militants who call themselves Pakistani Taliban have chalked many walls in the country’s capital Islamabad with their slogans ‘We are now here’, ‘We would bring Islamic Sharia’, ‘We will take revenge of the Red Mosque’ etc.
According to the police, the citizens saw many walls chalked with these slogans when they woke Thursday morning.
Observers say that it indicates that the militants this way want to see the reaction as they did in other areas of the country. When they see that security forces don’t show any strong reaction to their appearance, they start attacking shops and hotels and then they seize police stations and other places.
The Red Mosque was the centre of a fight between the security forces and the pro-Taliban militants this July which lasted many days and ended with the killing of hundreds of people, most of them students of the Madrassa. A leader of the Mosque, Ghazi Abdul Rashid, was among the dead.
On the same day, the militants fired rockets on Kamra army base but, fortunately, their was no any casulaties and only a little damage to the mess.
Besides this, the militants of South Waziristan claimed they had seized another army fort in Sararogha but the army have rejected this claim as false. They had seized the first fort two days ago after a fierce fight which lasted four hours and ended with the killing of 7 soldiers and 40 militants.