PESHAWAR: The suicide bomber was wearing a uniform and helmet when he staged the blast at a Pakistan mosque targeting police officers, a police chief said Thursday.
“Those on duty didn’t check him because he was in a police uniform... It was a security lapse,” Moazzam Jah Ansari, the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police force, told a news conference.
Police have a “fair idea” about who the bomber was after matching his head found at the scene with CCTV images.
“There’s an entire network behind him,” Ansari said, explaining that the bomber had not planned the assault alone.
The death toll from the blast has been revised down to 84, police officials said Thursday.
The figure had earlier been put at 101 killed, in the suicide attack inside a police headquarters in Peshawar on Monday.
“The confusion arose and wrong statistics came out due to double registration by the families in the hospitals,” Peshawar city police chief Muhammad Ijaz Khan told AFP.
“Now that the rescue work has been completed, we have completed the statistics, according to which 84 people were martyred.”
He said 83 were policemen, while one was a civilian woman living and working on the compound.
Moazzam Jah Ansari, the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police force, confirmed the new death toll to reporters.
Several police officers remain in a critical condition in hospital.
Authorities are investigating how a major breach could happen in one of the most sensitive areas of the city, which houses intelligence and counter-terrorism bureaus and is next door to the regional secretariat.
It is Pakistan’s deadliest assault in several years and the worst since violence began in the region after the Afghan Taliban takeover in Kabul in 2021.
Authorities are also investigating the possibility that people inside the compound helped to co-ordinate the attack, a senior city police official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Wednesday.
“We have detained people from the police line (headquarters) to get to the bottom of how the explosive material made its way in and to see if any police officials were also involved in the attack,” he told AFP.
The police official said that at least 23 people had been detained, including some from the nearby former tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
The assault has put a scarred city on edge, harking back to more than a decade ago when Peshawar was at the centre of rampant militancy carried out by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) before a clearance operation flushed them into the mountainous border and Afghanistan.
