A suicide attacker detonated a powerful bomb inside a crowded mosque in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 50 people and injuring 80 as they celebrated one of Islam's major holidays with the country's former interior minister, Pakistani officials said.
The official, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, was unhurt, but his son and two grandnephews were injured in the attack. The bombing was the second assassination attempt in eight months on Mr. Sherpao, who served as the country's top law enforcement official until last month.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Sherpao said that the bomb exploded as he and his relatives prayed in the front row of worshipers. He said he believed that the attacker had detonated the bomb in the third or fourth row of worshipers.
"It was a massacre," Mr. Sherpao said, his voice shaking with anger. "I can tell you that."
Independent Pakistani television stations showed images of blood-spattered prayer caps and clothes scattered across a white marble courtyard outside the mosque. Trails of scarlet blood marked where the injured were dragged from the building. Dozens of pairs of shoes – those of the dead and wounded -- lay abandoned.
The mosque, a modest white structure, was in the former minister's family compound in his ancestral village of Sherpao. A local police official estimated that hundreds of people were inside the mosque at the time of the attack, celebrating the holiday with him. The number of dead was expected to rise through the day.
Islamists are giving Islam a bad name, and the terrorists are busy slaughtering fellow Muslims at an alarming rate. Eid is one of the holiest days on the Muslim calendar, and suicide bombers struck at a mosque full of parishoners.
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