PESHAWAR: The death toll from a double suicide bombing on a FC training centre in the Shabqadar Tehsil of Charsadda rose to 89 on Saturday, police said.
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan said Friday's attack in the town of Shabqadar, which also wounded around 140 people, 40 of them critically, was to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US forces.
It was the deadliest attack this year in the nuclear-armed country where the government is in crisis over the killing of the al Qaeda chief earlier this month.
“The death toll has risen to 89,” district police chief Nisar Khan Marwat told AFP.
“There are five civilians among the dead and four other bodies which had been torn into pieces could not be identified yet,” Marwat said.
The death toll was revised from a previous figure of 80.
Friday's explosions took place as newly trained paramilitary cadets, dressed in civilian clothes, were getting into buses for a 10-day leave, police said.
The victims of the attacks were buried today in their respective hometowns, while the injured have been admitted to the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar.
Shabqadar is close to Mohmand, which is in the lawless tribal belt that Washington has branded the headquarters of al Qaeda and where CIA drones carry out missile strikes on Taliban and other Islamist militant commanders.
There has been little public protest in support of bin Laden in a country where more people have been killed in bomb attacks in the past four years than the nearly 3,000 who died in al Qaeda's September 11, 2001 strikes on the US.
Pakistan lawmakers pledged Saturday there must be no repeat of the US commando raid that killed bin Laden and said drone strikes targeting terrorists near the border with Afghanistan must end.
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