A local affiliate of militant group Isis claimed responsibility for Friday’s suicide bombing attack on a Shia mosque on the outskirts of Islamabad, which left at least 31 people dead.
The attack marked a rare bombing in Pakistan’s capital, occurring as its Western-allied government struggled to contain a surge in militant assaults nationwide.
Television footage and social media images showed police and residents frantically transporting the injured to nearby hospitals. Some of those caught in the blast at the expansive Khadija Al-Kubra mosque are reported to be in critical condition.
The regional Isis affiliate claimed responsibility in a statement posted on its Amaq News Agency. Isis also released an image that it said showed the attacker holding a gun, his face covered and eyes blurred, according to a statement on its Telegram channel. Reuters could not immediately verify the photo.
More than 170 others were wounded in the explosion, detonated after guards challenged the attacker as he made his way into the Khadija Tul Kubra Imambargah compound on the outskirts of the city, officials said.
Authorities said several suspects, including the brother, mother and other relatives of the bomber, were arrested during overnight raids in Islamabad and in northwestern Pakistan, and that a police officer was killed in the operation.
More than 2,000 grief-stricken mourners gathered as coffins of those killed were brought to the mosque for funerals. Senior government officials and leaders of the Shiite community were among those who attended the funerals for about a dozen victims. Funerals of other victims were to be held in their home towns.
Images from the site showed bloodied bodies lying on the carpeted mosque floor surrounded by shards of glass, debris and panicked worshippers. Dozens more wounded were lying in the gardens of the compound as people called for help. Survivors said they heard gunshots and seconds later the blast, soon after the prayers began.
The man blew “himself up in the last row of worshippers”, defence minister Khawaja Asif wrote on X.
He said the bomber had a history of travelling to Afghanistan and blamed neighbouring India for sponsoring the assault, without providing evidence.
India’s foreign office condemned the attack and dismissed Pakistan’s statement as “baseless”.
“It is unfortunate that, instead of seriously addressing the problems plaguing its social fabric, Pakistan should choose to delude itself by blaming others for its home-grown ills,” it said in a statement.
At Islamabad’s largest public hospital, family members waited outside and in crowded corridors for news.
Sarfraz Shah, 46, said he had gone to the mosque with his younger brother Manzar, 39, as he did every Friday.
“I heard the gunshots and I was just trying to make sense of what had happened when there was a massive explosion,” Mr Shah said at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences hospital.
“It threw people here and there. There was smoke. No one knew what had happened. Then there was blood everywhere.”
He added through tears that there was no sign of his brother anywhere but when he came to the hospital he discovered that Manzar was among those killed.
The attack was the deadliest suicide bombing in Islamabad in more than a decade, according to conflict monitor ACLED.
Shahid Malik, a police official who was involved in shifting the injured people and dead bodies to hospital, said what he had witnessed was a nightmare.
“I have seen many crime scenes. But this was horrible, very horrible,” he said, adding there were between 600 and 700 people at the mosque.
Shi’ites, who are a minority in the predominantly Sunni Muslim nation of 241 million, have been targeted in sectarian violence in the past, including by Islamic State and the Sunni Islamist group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Bombings are rare in the heavily guarded capital, although Pakistan has been hit by a rising wave of militancy in the past few years, particularly along the border with Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s foreign ministry condemned the attack.
Kabul has repeatedly denied charges that it provides safe haven to militants carrying out attacks in Pakistan.”A total of 31 people have lost their lives. The number of wounded brought to hospitals has risen to 169,” Islamabad’s deputy commissioner, Irfan Memon, said in a statement.
The capital was already on high alert on Friday for the visiting president of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, with roads around the capital blocked by checkpoints and security forces posted across the city.
Pakistan has also blamed India for assaults by militants in the restive Balochistan province over the weekend, accusations that have fanned smouldering tensions between the nuclear-powered neighbours who engaged in their worst conflict in decades in May.
Delhi has denied any involvement in the violence in Balochistan where Pakistan’s military has battled a decades-long insurgency.
That region was brought to a standstill after separatist militants stormed government buildings, hospitals and markets in a coordinated attack, killing 58 civilians and security officials. The military said it killed 216 militants in targeted offensives across the province. The military said earlier on Friday that another 24 militants linked to the TTP were killed in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The last major attack in Islamabad was a suicide bombing on 11 November that killed 12 people and wounded 27 others. Pakistan said it was carried out by an Afghan national. No group claimed responsibility for that attack.
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