A suicide bomber blew himself up at a political rally in a former stronghold of militants in northwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan on Sunday, killing at least 44 people and wounding nearly 200 in an attack that a senior leader said was meant to weaken Pakistani Islamists.
The Bajur district near the Afghan border was a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban - a close ally of Afghanistan's Taliban government - before the Pakistani army drove the militants out of the area. Supporters of hardline Pakistani cleric and political party leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, whose Jamiat Ulema Islam generally supports regional Islamists, were meeting in Bajur in a hall close to a market outside the district capital.
“There was dust and smoke around, and I was under some injured people from where I could hardly stand up, only to see chaos and some scattered limbs,” said Adam Khan, 45, who was knocked to the ground by the blast around 4 p.m. and hit by splinters in his leg and both hands. The bombing came hours before the arrival of Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Islamabad, where he was to participate in an event to mark a decade of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC, a sprawling package under which Beijing has invested billions of dollars in Pakistan.
The bombing was one of the four worst attacks in the northwest since 2014, when 147 people, mostly schoolchildren, were killed in a Taliban attack on an army-run school in Peshawar. In January, 74 people were killed in a bombing at a mosque in Peshawar. n February, more than 100 people, mostly policemen, died in a bombing at a mosque inside a high-security compound housing Peshawar police headquarters.
Maulana Ziaullah, the local chief of Rehman's party, was among the dead. JUI leaders Rasheed and former lawmaker Maulana Jamaluddin were also on the stage but escaped unhurt.
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