Death toll rises to at least 80 in Pakistan mosque suicide bombing

The death toll from the suicide bombing at a mosque in northwest Pakistan rose to 83 on Tuesday, officials said.

The attack on a Sunni mosque in a major police facility was one of the deadliest attacks on Pakistani security forces in recent years.

More than 300 worshipers were praying at the mosque in the city of Peshawar, with more approaching, when the bomber detonated his explosive vest on Monday morning.

The blast ripped through the mosque, killing and injuring dozens of people, and also blew off part of the roof.

According to Zafar Khan, a police officer, what was left of the roof collapsed, injuring many more people. Rescue workers had to remove mountains of rubble to reach the believers still trapped under the rubble.

According to Mohammad Asim, a spokesman for the government hospital in Peshawar, more bodies were pulled from the rubble of the mosque during the night and Tuesday morning and several seriously injured people died in hospital.

“Most of them were police officers,” Asim said of the victims.

Bilal Faizi, the chief rescue officer, said rescue teams were still working on Tuesday at the site of the mosque — located on a police compound in a high-security zone of the city — as more people are believed to be trapped after the roof collapsed.

He said the bombing also injured more than 150 people. It was not clear how the bomber could have slipped into the walled compound in a high-security zone with other government buildings.

Authorities have not determined who was behind the bombing. Shortly after the explosion on Monday, Sarbakaf Mohmand, a commander of the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, claimed responsibility for the attack in a post on Twitter.

But hours later, TTP spokesman Mohammad Khurasani distanced the group from the bombing, saying it was not its policy to attack mosques, seminaries and religious sites.

His statement did not address why a TTP commander had claimed responsibility for the bombing.