Bomb attack kills 25 in northwest Pakistan mosque: Official
At least 25 people have been killed and 30 more wounded in a bomb attack in a Pakistani mosque near the Afghanistan border, a regional official says.
The blast occurred during Friday prayers in a tribal area bordering Afghanistan, Naveed Akbar, the deputy administrator of Mohmand agency, said.
"The suicide bomber was in [a] crowded mosque,” he added, saying, it was a “huge blast.”
"A portion of the mosque and veranda collapsed in the blast and fell on worshipers. We are still retrieving bodies and the injured from rubble of the mosque building," he said.
A second regional official confirmed the bombing in the village of Payee Khan, in the troubled Mohmand region of the lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
"Many people were gathered inside the mosque where a suicide bomber blew himself up," Shaukat Khan, another official in the northwestern FATA region, said.
A splinter group of the pro-Taliban militants, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan Jamaat-ur-Ahrar (TTP-JA), claimed responsibility for the blast.
Thousands of people have been killed over the past decade as a result of the surge in violence in Pakistan.
Pro-Taliban elements killed over 150 people, most of them children, in an armed assault on a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar in December 2014.
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