A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a mosque in a suburb of Pakistan’s capital city Friday, killing at least 30 people and leaving around 170 others wounded, police told The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies. A security official in the area told CBS News the attack in Islamabad came while the Shiite Muslim mosque was packed with people for Friday prayers.
Images from the scene showed dozens of people lying bloodied on the floor of the Imambargah Khadijatul Kubra mosque in Islamabad’s Tarlai suburb, while others were piled into any vehicles available to be transported to local hospitals.
Children could be seen among the casualties.
The security official, who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity, noted that there hadn’t been a major attack since a suicide bombing that hit a court in Islamabad about two months ago, prompting the alert level in the capital to be raised to its highest.
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“Apparently bombers failed to reach big targets inside the capital and turned to soft targets such as mosques and public places in the suburbs,” the official said.
Witnesses said the bomber was stopped at the gate and then blew himself up.
Zahir Hussain told CBS News he was parking to go into the mosque when the massive explosion threw him against his car door.
“After that, for a while there was horrific silence, then what I saw in the mosque, I don’t have words to explain it,” Hussain said.
Police and emergency services declared an emergency for Islamabad’s hospitals. Authorities said the nearby PIMS Hospital had already reached full capacity as victims were brought in, and some of the injured were being transferred to other hospitals in the capital and neighboring Rawalpindi.
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Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met with the country’s interior minister and ordered an investigation into the attack.
Sharif vowed in a statement that those responsible would be brought to justice, and no one would be allowed to spread hatred and insecurity in the country.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility and officials named no suspects.
Pakistan has faced violent attacks by a number of regional terrorist groups, including both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, neither of which frequently targets Shiite Muslims, and the regional ISIS affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), and others that have attacked civilians and security forces indiscriminately.
