Worship turned bloodbath

A teenage suicide bomber targeted a Friday prayers congregation at a mosque in a semi-tribal area near Peshawar, killing 61 people and maiming more than 100, officials said.
The bombing in Darra Adam Khel, in the administrative jurisdiction of Kohat district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, was the deadliest in two months. It destroyed the mosque structure, trapping human remains under a toppled roof and pulverised rubble, witnesses said.
Local tribal elder Sohbat Khan Afridi blamed the Taliban, given that Wali Muhammad, who formed the tribal lashkar in 2007 to rise up against the militants, has a house close to the mosque, although he is understood to live in Lahore.
The Taliban and the lashkar clashed repeatedly in the area but this year they reached some kind of compromise in which blood money was paid to the Taliban, Afridi said. He declined to go into further details saying only: “The lashkar apologised to the Taliban because they did not have the means to defeat the Taliban.”