Peshawar Tablighi Markaz blown up, 8 dead

ISLAMABAD (Pajhwok): A bomb blast ripped through a religious centre in the capital of Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Thursday evening, killing at least eight people and wounding 67 others, officials said.

A spokesman for the provincial government, Shaukat Yousafzai, said the blast took place in a Tablighi (preacher) centre in the Charsadda Road area around 5pm, when hundreds of people had gathered at the mosque for evening prayers.

He said eight people were killed and 67 others injured in the blast. The injured were rushed to the Peshawar Lady Reading Hospital, with some of them being critical, Yousafzai, also the provincial health minister, said.

The Tablighi Markaz on the Pajaggi Road was thronged by nearly a thousand people for a Shab-i-Juma (Thursday) congregation when the bomb ripped through the centre.

A senior bomb disposal squad official Shafqat Malik said the explosives had been planted inside a canister of ghee (cooking oil) and was detonated with a timed device.

Elsewhere in the troubled province, a bomb planted outside another Tablighi Markaz in Nowshera was defused, around the same time the bomb exploded in Peshawar.

The bomb, having the same weight (five kilograms) and also in a canister of ghee, was planted outside the mosque’s main gate.

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