Islamic State in Khorasan province claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on its Amaq website. It said the attacker detonated an explosive vest and that the blast in the northwest Pakistani town of Bajur was part of the organization’s ongoing war against forms of democracy it views as anti-Islam.
Hours earlier on Monday, hundreds of mourners in Bajur carried coffins wrapped in colorful cloth to their graves after the previous day’s attack on an election event for the Jamiat Ulema Islam party. Officials said Sunday’s attack left 54 dead, including at least five children, and injured nearly 200.
The attack appeared to reflect divisions between Islamic groups, which have a strong presence in the district, which is located in the Khaiber Pashtunjua province that borders Afghanistan. The Jamiat Ulema Islam party has ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At least 1,000 people were gathered inside a tent near a market to witness the event leading up to the year-end elections, according to police.
“People were shouting ‘God is great’ as the leaders arrived,” said Khan Mohammad, a local resident who said he was outside the tent, “and that’s when I heard the deafening sound of the bomb.”
Mohammad said he heard people pleading for help, and minutes later ambulances arrived and began taking away the injured.
In their initial investigation, the police had hinted that the Islamic State group in Khorasan province was one of the suspects. The group is based in neighboring Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, and is an enemy of the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda.
Pakistani security analyst Mahmood Shah had also previously said that dissident factions of the Pakistani Taliban might be suspects, though the group distanced itself from the attack.
Pakistan’s military spent years fighting the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, in Bajur before declaring the district free of extremists in 2016. But the Jamiat Ulema Islam party, led by the hardline cleric Fazlur Rehman, has remained a major political force.
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Associated Press writer Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
