Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial political party convention blast kills 44

KHAR: On Sunday, an explosion at a political gathering near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan left at least 44 people dead and close to 200 more injured. A top official claimed the attack was carried out to weaken Pakistani Islamists.

Before the Pakistani army drove the militants out of the area, the Pakistani Taliban, a close supporter of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, had a stronghold in the Bajur district close to the Afghan border. Supporters of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a hardline Pakistani cleric and head of a political organisation whose Jamiat Ulema Islam typically backs local Islamists, gathered in Bajur on Sunday in a hall next to a market outside the district’s headquarters. Rehman, according to party officials, was not present at the demonstration, but organisers added tents because so many fans came, and volunteers from the party were using batons to control the crowd.

In one of Pakistan’s deadliest recent attacks, officials were announcing the arrival of Abdul Rasheed, a leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party.

Adam Khan, 45, was knocked to the ground by the explosion at 4 p.m. and was hurt by splinters in his knee and both hands. “There was dust and smoke around, and I was under some injured people from where I could hardly stand up, only to see chaos and some scattered limbs,” he recalled.

The bombing was intended to incite animosity among Islamists, according to a statement from the Pakistan Taliban, or TTP, that was emailed to The Associated Press. On the social networking website X, formerly known as Twitter, Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, stated that “such crimes cannot be justified in any way.”

The TTP became more assertive when the Afghan Taliban took control of the country in the middle of August 2021. In November, they unilaterally brokered a cease-fire with the Pakistani government, and since then, attacks have increased all over the nation.

The incident occurred hours before Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng arrived in Islamabad, where he was scheduled to take part in a ceremony to commemorate ten years of the expansive China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC, a programme in which Beijing has made significant investments in Pakistan.

China has recently assisted Pakistan in preventing a sovereign payment default. However, militants have also attacked several Chinese citizens in northwest Pakistan and other places.

According to Feroz Jamal, the provincial communications minister, 44 people have already been “martyred” and close to 200 have been injured in the bombing.

The bombing was one of the four deadliest strikes in the northwest since 2014, when the Taliban attacked an army-run school in Peshawar, killing 147 people, mostly children. A Peshawar mosque was bombed in January, killing 74 people. More than 100 people were killed in an explosion at a mosque inside a high-security complex housing the Peshawar police headquarters in February, the most of them police officers.

President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Sharif both denounced the incident and urged authorities to help the injured and the relatives of the deceased in whatever way they could.