© Fayaz Aziz/ReutersA man cries at the death of his brother in the coordinated attack on the church in Peshawar, Pakistan.
A suicide bomb attack on a historic church in north-western Pakistan has killed at least 60 people and wounded more than 120, officials said, in one of the worst assaults on the country's Christian minority in years.
The bombing underlines the threat posed by Islamic extremists as the government seeks a peace deal with domestic Taliban militants.
It occurred as worshippers were coming out of the church service in Peshawar city to get a free meal of rice offered on the front lawn, said a top government administrator, Sahibzada Anees.
"There were blasts and there was hell for all of us," said Nazir John, who was at the church with at least 400 other worshippers. "When I got my senses back, I found nothing but smoke, dust, blood and screaming people. I saw severed body parts and blood all around."
Survivors wailed and hugged each other in the wake of the blasts. The white walls of the All Saints church were pockmarked with holes probably caused by ball bearings or other metal objects contained in the bombs to cause maximum damage. Blood stained the floor and was splashed on the walls. Plates of rice were scattered across the ground.
The attack was carried out by a pair of suicide bombers, said the police officer Shafqat Malik. Authorities found their body parts and were trying to determine their age, he said.
Comment: Right, they found body parts in the immediate aftermath and went, 'Yes, it was definitely a pair of suicide bombers and it was definitely these two!'
That is simply not believable.
The number of casualties from the blasts was so high that the hospital was running out of caskets for the dead and beds for the wounded, said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, a former information minister for the surrounding Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, who was on the scene.
"What have we done wrong to these people?" asked one of the wounded, John Tariq, referring to the attackers. "Why are we being killed?"
The dead included several women and children, said Sher Ali Khan, a doctor at a hospital in Peshawar where the victims were being treated.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on one of the country's many Islamic militant groups. Islamic militants have been blamed for previous attacks on the Muslim country's Christian minority, as well as Muslim groups they consider heretics.
Islamic militants have carried out dozens of attacks across the country since Nawaz Sharif became prime minister in June, even though he has made clear that he believes a peace deal with the largest group, the Taliban, is the best way to tamp down violence in the country.
Comment: Which is largely why the ISI and CIA are ramping up the pressure against him by blowing people up.
Pakistan's major political parties endorsed Sharif's call for negotiations earlier this month. But the Taliban have said the government must release militant prisoners and begin pulling troops out of the north-west tribal region that serves as their sanctuary before they will begin talks.
Source: The Associated Press
Comment: Again, we're being asked to believe the incredible without the slightest bit of evidence provided. The same goes for all preceding 'suicide attacks' where there were neither witnesses nor surveillance footage confirming that one or more persons blew themselves up (which is probably the vast majority of such attacks).
That leaves us with car bombs, some form of pre-planted explosives, or persons forced by some third party to serve as 'bomb mules', against their will. Given how often these attacks happen in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, we're obviously looking at perpetrators who are powerful enough to direct local police investigations and state media.