ISLAMABAD: The police chief of Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province said on Thursday that his force was closing in on the terror network responsible for the January 30 blast at the Peshawar mosque that killed at least 101 worshippers, most of them policemen.
The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the suicide blast inside the city’s highly fortified police compound, but retracted hours later, and its splinter group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, owned up the attack.
Addressing a presser, KP’s police chief, Moazzam Jah Ansari, said: “We have traced the suicide bomber through the CCTV footage of his movement from Khyber Road to the Police Lines. The attacker was dressed in police uniform and was wearing a mask and a helmet.”
Ansari said the cops manning the entrance of the Police Lines failed to frisk him since he was in the police uniform. “At 12:37pm, he entered on a motorcycle, and asked a constable where the mosque was. This means the attacker was not aware of the area. He was given a target and there is an entire network behind him … he was not a lone wolf,” he said.
The officer revealed that 10-12 kg of TNT (trinitrotoluene) was used to carry out the blast. “In TNT blasts, the shock waves have no space to go anywhere,” he said, adding that this was the reason for the large number of casualties.
“The 50-year-old mosque did not have pillars…so, the walls and roof of the building collapsed with the explosion. My children (policemen) were trapped under the rubble for hours,” an emotional Ansari said, adding that police could have cleaned up the debris within two hours by using heavy machinery, but didn’t do so, and that’s the reason “there are people still breathing in the hospital today”.
Referring to protests across the province on Wednesday by policemen, who raised slogans against “unknown forces” in veiled attacks on the military, the officer said “conspiracy theories” were being spun to “incite my children (policemen), lead them astray and bring them to the streets”.
“We were still burying our dead when another storm brewed. My children (policemen) were misled and started demanding protection,” Ansari said, and asked that if the officers trained to fight back started talking about protection, then “who would protect the country?”
Asserting that there was no unrest in the police force, the KP police chief said: “Do not hit us, do not present conspiracy theories, let us investigate…we will make everything public.”
The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the suicide blast inside the city’s highly fortified police compound, but retracted hours later, and its splinter group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, owned up the attack.
Addressing a presser, KP’s police chief, Moazzam Jah Ansari, said: “We have traced the suicide bomber through the CCTV footage of his movement from Khyber Road to the Police Lines. The attacker was dressed in police uniform and was wearing a mask and a helmet.”
Ansari said the cops manning the entrance of the Police Lines failed to frisk him since he was in the police uniform. “At 12:37pm, he entered on a motorcycle, and asked a constable where the mosque was. This means the attacker was not aware of the area. He was given a target and there is an entire network behind him … he was not a lone wolf,” he said.
The officer revealed that 10-12 kg of TNT (trinitrotoluene) was used to carry out the blast. “In TNT blasts, the shock waves have no space to go anywhere,” he said, adding that this was the reason for the large number of casualties.
“The 50-year-old mosque did not have pillars…so, the walls and roof of the building collapsed with the explosion. My children (policemen) were trapped under the rubble for hours,” an emotional Ansari said, adding that police could have cleaned up the debris within two hours by using heavy machinery, but didn’t do so, and that’s the reason “there are people still breathing in the hospital today”.
Referring to protests across the province on Wednesday by policemen, who raised slogans against “unknown forces” in veiled attacks on the military, the officer said “conspiracy theories” were being spun to “incite my children (policemen), lead them astray and bring them to the streets”.
“We were still burying our dead when another storm brewed. My children (policemen) were misled and started demanding protection,” Ansari said, and asked that if the officers trained to fight back started talking about protection, then “who would protect the country?”
Asserting that there was no unrest in the police force, the KP police chief said: “Do not hit us, do not present conspiracy theories, let us investigate…we will make everything public.”