Suicide car bomb at Kohat police mosque kills at least 16 during Friday prayers

A suicide attacker drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a mosque beside the old Police Lines in Kohat on Friday, killing at least 16 people as worshippers gathered for weekly prayers. Provincial police chief Zulfiqar Hameed said the car struck the gate and detonated. A second blast followed at the Special Branch building during an exchange of fire.

Hospital officials put the dead at five police officers and 11 civilians. Dr Tahir Shah, medical superintendent at the District Headquarters Hospital, said more than 50 injured people were brought in, some in critical condition. Rescue official Bilal Faizi said most of the wounded were worshippers. The mosque roof collapsed. Photographs from the site showed a crater outside the building and a collapsed outer wall of the police offices.

Kohat sits about 60 kilometres southwest of Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, near the Afghan border. At least two armed men tried to enter the police compound after the first explosion, Hameed said. Some attackers moved toward the Counter Terrorism Department building and were killed there. Others reached the Special Branch offices, where a second suicide blast occurred.

Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan claimed responsibility, according to Dawn. The alliance was formed in April 2025 and groups the Hafiz Gul Bahadur faction with Harakat Inqilab-e-Islami Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Islam. Early Associated Press reports noted that no claim had yet arrived and that suspicion would likely fall on Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. The later claim names a smaller umbrella rather than TTP itself.

The attack came a day after a roadside bomb hit a security convoy in neighbouring Hangu district and killed six soldiers. Violence along the north-west frontier has risen as Pakistani forces press operations against militants. Islamabad accuses the Taliban government in Kabul of allowing groups that strike inside Pakistan to operate from Afghan soil. Kabul denies that charge.

Kohat has long housed police lines, a cantonment and a mosque used by officers and civilians. Friday prayers concentrate both groups in one building. That pattern has been used before in Pakistan: a vehicle bomb at the entrance, then gunmen trying to exploit the first blast to reach offices behind the mosque.

Hameed’s account is more specific than the first hospital tallies. He described two detonation points and an attempt to reach the CTD and Special Branch buildings, which handle intelligence and counter-terror files. If that sequence holds, the target was not only the congregation. It was the district security apparatus that sits behind the prayer hall.

Death tolls in the first hours moved from seven to 15 to 16 as bodies reached the hospital. Several of the wounded remain in danger, so the number may still rise. No group other than Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen has issued a detailed claim. TTP and Islamic State Khorasan both operate in the same belt and have hit mosques and police facilities in the past two years, including the February bombing of a Shia mosque on the edge of Islamabad that killed 31 people.

For families in Kohat the immediate work is identification and burial before sunset on Friday. For the provincial government the question is whether the second blast at Special Branch means local intelligence files were the point of the raid. Hameed has not released the names of the dead officers or said whether any of the gunmen were captured alive.

The wider pattern is familiar and unfinished. Pakistan has repatriated more than 2.5 million Afghans over three years and is now fighting a court battle over Afghan medical students. Those policies sit beside a security campaign that still cannot keep a car bomb off the forecourt of a police mosque at prayer time. The two files will be read together in Peshawar and in Kabul, whether officials want that link or not.