Thirty-five people have died and more than a hundred have been injured this Sunday in a suicide attack perpetrated during a meeting of the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam - known for its ties to hardline political Islam - in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in northern Pakistan.
According to the initial information, it is a suicide attack that took place around 4:00 p.m. local time (11:00 GMT) when there were hundreds of people present," an officer from the police station in the town of Khar told EFE.
The source warned that the number of victims may increase due to the large number of attendees at the event, although the Police have not yet mentioned the possible cause of the explosion recorded during the meeting. And, in the same way, the attack has not yet been claimed by any insurgent group.
Pakistan has experienced an increase in armed violence since the Afghan Taliban came to power in Kabul in August 2021, which reignited attacks by its Pakistani ideological brethren, especially in the Afghan border provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
The main Pakistani group, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) -which pledges allegiance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, but is not directly part of them-, announced last December the end of a ceasefire reached with Islamabad, which accused of breaching its commitments in peace negotiations.
The country witnessed 271 militant attacks in the first half of the year, in which 389 people were killed and 656 others injured, according to a report published in early July by Pakistan's Institute for Security and Conflict Studies.
A significant increase in the figures compared to the same period in 2022, when Pakistan suffered 151 attacks that caused 293 deaths and 487 injuries.
