Pakistani cleric close to Taliban killed in mosque blast in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 20 injured

At least three persons were on Friday killed and 20 injured in a blast at a mosque in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The explosion took place at Darul Uloom Haqqania in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Nowshera district. Friday prayers were being held at the mosque at the time of the blast.

Zulfiqar Hameed, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Inspector General of Police, told Geo TV that Maulana Hamidul Haq Haqqani has been killed in the attack. He said that Haqqani was the target of the blast that appeared to be a suicide attack.

Haqqani was an Islamic cleric and a politician who heads the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Sami). He was close to the Afghan Taliban and his father Maulana Samiul Haq, who was also assassinated in 2018, was called ‘Father of teh Taliban’.

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The family-run Darul Uloom Haqqania is one of Pakistan’s largest seminaries is one of the feeder institutions of the Afghan Taliban. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister of Taliban regime in Afghanistan and widely believed to be the most powerful man in the country after the group’s supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada is a graduate of the seminary. The seminary has previously been linked to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the country’s premier assassinated in 2007.

Last year, Haqqani had a delegation of Pakistani clerics to Afghanistan to hold talks with Taliban leaders, which was dubbed as “religious diplomacy”. He said at the time that the visit was intended to resolve the mistrust between the regimes of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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In a statement after the confirmation of Haqqani’s death, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan appeared to blame the attack on the Islamic State (ISIS) — the two have fought bitterly in recent years and ISIS is waging an insurgency against the Taliban rule.

In an apparent reference to the ISIS, Taliban’s interior ministry spokesperson Abdul Mateen Qani told Dawn, “We strongly condemn the attack, we know them as the enemies of the religion, we have tried our best to eliminate them successfully.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack as an act of cowardice.

“Such cowardly and heinous acts of terrorism cannot dampen our resolve against terrorism,” said Shehbaz. “[We are] resolute to completely eradicate all forms of terrorism from the country.”