Updated 19 September. The death toll from Friday’s suicide bombing at a police compound mosque in Kohat, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has risen to at least 31 people, including 16 police personnel, with dozens more injured, Hiru News reported citing AFP. A faction of the Pakistan Taliban has claimed responsibility.

The first filings on Friday put the toll at 16.

A note on the number 16. It appears in both accounts but means different things. On Friday it was the total dead — described by police as 11 civilians and five officers. In the updated toll it is the number of police personnel among 31 dead. The figures are not two versions of the same count.

Who carried it out

Ittehadul Mujahideen — the name means Mujahideen Alliance — said it carried out the suicide bombing. The group is a faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and is linked to Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur.

No group had claimed the attack when the first reports were filed.

The TTP is separate from, but allied with, the Afghan Taliban, which returned to power in 2021.

The attack

As worshippers gathered for Friday prayers, an explosives-laden car was rammed into the entrance of a mosque at a police headquarters in Kohat, a city near the Afghan border. Provincial police chief Zulfikar Hameed confirmed the suicide bombing.

After the explosion, gunmen attempted to enter the police compound and exchanged fire with officers. At least six of the attackers were killed in the fighting, Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder reported from Islamabad — a figure far above the single vest-wearing assailant named on Friday.

The mosque was badly damaged and the police station’s outer wall collapsed. Residents said they heard the blast from some distance away.

Senior rescue official Bilal Faizi said most of the wounded were worshippers, according to the Associated Press.

The casualty figures still differ by source

The injured count has not settled, and the sources diverge widely:

The figure of 15 bodies at hospital appeared in Friday’s reporting too, alongside a toll of 16. It is a single-hospital count, not a total, which is why it sits unchanged beneath a toll that has since doubled.

One attack, described three ways

Friday’s Sri Lankan filings carried headlines that appeared to describe different targets — a police facility in the Daily Mirror and NewsFirst, a mosque in Hiru News. Read together, the accounts resolve to a single event.

The mosque stands inside the police compound. The vehicle struck the perimeter — NewsFirst identified it as the Old Police Lines gate, while the Daily Mirror reported it rammed an outer wall, which the updated account confirms collapsed — and the blast went off close to the mosque where police personnel, their families and other civilians were at Friday prayers.

That geography explains the casualty pattern: a strike on a police target killed roughly two non-police for every officer, because the congregation included families.

Context

Militant attacks in Pakistan’s border regions have risen sharply in recent months, directed mainly at the military and police.

“Kohat is close to the Afghan border, it is the main city en route to the restive North Waziristan region, it is also on the way to Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan. Over the past few months, we’ve seen deadly attacks on all these areas,” Hyder said.

Michael Semple, a visiting professor at Queen’s University Belfast and a former EU representative in Afghanistan, told Al Jazeera the armed groups are trying to “overthrow the Pakistan government”, and that a sophisticated attack such as Kohat could not be attempted without planning, logistics and training.

“Essentially, this seems to fit into the pattern of the Afghan Taliban providing sanctuary to both al-Qaeda and different factions of the TTP to do the kind of training for this kind of attack,” he said.

Islamabad maintains that militants operate from safe havens in Afghanistan. Officials in Kabul deny the accusation and say militancy is Pakistan’s own domestic problem.

Still not reported

The wounded count remains unreconciled between dpa’s “more than 50” and Al Jazeera’s “at least 75”, and no outlet gives a figure for those in critical condition. It is not stated whether the toll of 31 includes the six attackers killed, or counts only victims.

No report says whether the mosque or the police compound was the intended target, how the vehicle reached the perimeter, or whether the facility had recently been assessed as at risk.

Sources