The death toll from Pakistan’s worst terrorist attack in years climbed to more than 100 on Tuesday as rescue workers combed through the rubble of a mosque in a police compound in the northern city of Peshawar.
Most of those killed in Monday’s attack were police officers, raising fresh questions about the vulnerability of Pakistan’s security personnel to increasingly intense militant activity in the nuclear-armed south Asian nation of 220mn people.
The mosque attack came at a time when Pakistan is battling emergencies on multiple fronts, including a worsening government liquidity crisis and a continuing recovery effort in the wake of last year’s catastrophic floods.
A senior government official in Islamabad said the bombing had caused the largest number of police casualties in a single terrorist attack in Pakistan and had “completely shattered our sense of security”.
“We have had different attacks in recent years but this was surely huge,” said the official, who declined to be named.
In Peshawar, a local government official told reporters the death toll was expected to rise further. At least 150 people were wounded in the attack on the mosque, which was considered to have a well-fortified location within the compound of a large local police centre in Peshawar, a provincial capital near the border with Afghanistan.
It was unclear who was behind the attack. Police investigators said it was probably carried out by a suicide bomber associated with one of a number of Afghanistan-based Islamist militant groups.
Pakistan’s military has been engaged in a war of attrition against Islamist extremists. The Pakistani Taliban, a Pakistan-based offshoot of the Afghan militant group, in November called off a ceasefire and ordered its forces to carry out attacks across the country.
Analysts said there were indications the attack had been carried out using a bomb placed inside the mosque rather than carried in by a suicide bomber.
“There have been suicide attacks in the past. But in this case, the entire roof [of the mosque] caved in, which is unusual,” said Imtiaz Gul, a commentator on issues involving Pakistan’s border region.
Gul, whose first cousin, a police officer, was among those killed, said it was “very hard” to believe the official version of the attack. “How could a suicide bomber go through two security perimeters unchecked and then blow himself up inside the mosque?” he said.
How the attack was carried out could indicate how deeply Islamist militants have permeated Pakistan’s security system.
Pakistan, which is due to hold parliamentary elections by October this year, on Tuesday began talks with the IMF aimed at unlocking money from a $7bn facility with the lender on which it has been unable to reach agreement since November.
The country last week abandoned controls on its currency, the rupee, as part of efforts by the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to meet IMF conditions for the bailout. As Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves have dwindled, authorities have restricted companies’ access to hard cash, causing some to cut working times or to close.
“The attack in Peshawar comes at an unusually bad time for Pakistan just when the political and economic future is surrounded by so many challenges,” said Gul.