The death toll in the Saturday’s bombings in Peshawar’s Khyber Super Market has risen to 35 while the routine business activities in the locality remained suspended on Sunday. The officials and doctors in the Lady Reading Hospital informed that 47 seriously injured people were still being treated and the condition of some of them precarious, raising the fears of increase in death toll. On the other hand, AFP reported that Taliban claimed that they were not involved in the deadly attack and they only aimed their strikes at the government and military. “We did not carry out this attack in Peshawar. It is an attempt by foreign secret agencies who are doing it to malign us,” Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP on phone. “We do not target innocent people. Our targets are very clear, we attack security forces, government and people who are siding with it,” Ehsan said.
According to the AFP, the death toll climbed up to 39. “Death toll has risen to 39 in the blasts as four wounded people died in hospital,” senior local police official Ijaz Khan told AFP, adding that the explosions were just four minutes apart. “The first blast was quite small but as people gathered close to the site of the explosion, the second one, which was real big one, went off.” There are conflicting reports about the nature of the explosions. Soon after the incident, the high-ranking police officers termed the second blast a suicide attack. But the FIR registered in the local police tation says that improvise explosive devises had been used.
But the confusion can be gauged by the statements of police bosses. “The first blast was triggered by a timed device planted in the bathroom of the hotel while a suicide bomber riding a motorbike blew himself up near the hotel,” bomb disposal chief Shafqat Malik told AFP. “We have found a head and some other body parts of the bomber from the attack site,” he said. On Sunday, the city remained very tense while people from different parts of the province and tribal regions rushed to the site to know about their near and dear ones. Hundreds of local citizens also visited the site and expressed there resentment over the barbaric terrorist act.
Meanwhile, the funeral of killed people was held at their native areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and adjacent tribal areas. Most of the victims were students, hailing from various parts of the region, who had been staying in the provincial capital for their studies. A local journalist Naveed Anwar, commonly known as Asfandyar, was also amongst the victims. He was laid to rest at his ancestral graveyard at village Nasar Pur in outskirts of Peshawar. A large number of people from different walk of life attended the funeral.
