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The bombing drew nationwide condemnation from Pakistani opposition political parties and government officials. Ghulam Ali, the provincial governor in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Peshawar is the capital, said there were fears the death toll could rise even further. Most of the casualties were policemen and police officers – the targeted mosque is located within a sprawling compound, which also serves as the city's police headquarters. Police said between 300 to 350 worshipers were inside the mosque when the bomber detonated his explosives. Sarbakaf Mohmand, a commander for the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter. The main spokesman for...

The Jewish scholarly world is abuzz over the discovery of ancient Jewish scrolls in a cave in Afghanistan's Samangan province, Channel 2 reported on Friday. According to Arab Affairs correspondent Ehud Yeari, if validated the scrolls may be the most significant historical finding in the Jewish world since that of the Cairo Geniza in the 19th century. "We know today about a couple of findings," Haggai Ben-Shammai, Professor Emeritus of Arabic Language and Literature at Hebrew University was quoted as saying. "In all, in my opinion, there are about 150 fragments. It may be the tip of the iceberg." The...

An explosion at a religious seminary in Pakistan’s northern city of Peshawar has killed at least eight people and injured 136 others. The deadly blast took place at about 8.30 am at the Jamia Zuberia religious school in Dir Colony, where about 500 students were gathered to hear a lecture by influential cleric Rahimullah Haqqani. Most of them were between 20 and 30 years old and from the Khyber Pakthunkwa and Balochistan regions of Pakistan, as well as some from Afghanistan. A police superintendent, Waqar Azeem Kharal, said the explosion had been caused by at least five kilograms of high-quality...

Explosion in the northwestern city’s mosque which also serves as a religious school kills seven people and wounds at least 109 others. Islamabad, Pakistan – An explosion at a religious school in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar has killed at least seven people and wounded 109 others, police and health officials say. The blast occurred at the Speen Jamaat mosque, which also serves as a religious school for the local community in the city’s Dir Colony area, at 8:30am local time (3:30 GMT) on Tuesday, a police official told Al Jazeera shortly after the blast. “[Students] were reading the...

Pakistan’s foreign policy has been incoherent and inconsistent since its inception. It has suffered from a chasm between policy and strategy, xenophobic tendencies, domestic politics interfering negatively with the foreign policy process, and vice versa – including the unsettling influence of the military on civilian politics and the outsize impact of religious groups. Policy-makers, rather than focusing on the policy process and the outcomes, serially succumb to socio-religious pressures, intensifying policy volatility, and that volatility, read as vulnerability, opens Pakistan up to manipulation by stronger world powers. The result is that on the issues that Pakistan flags as central to...

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis protested on Sunday against the normalisation deal signed between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel, Anadolu reported. Mass rallies were held across Pakistan, including the capital, Islamabad, the port city of Karachi, northeastern city of Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Multan and Hyderabad. The protests were organised by the Milli Yakjehti Council, a political-religious alliance which called on the Pakistani people to join the protests and denounce “the controversial deal between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv”. In the city of Rawalpindi, thousands of citizens marched through the city streets led by Senator Sirajul...

Naseem was charged with denigrating the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad. Two years later, awaiting his bail hearing surrounded by police and lawyers, he was gunned down. Faisal Khan, a 15-year-old Pakistani, beams for selfies with lawyers and police. Thousands hail him in the streets as a “holy warrior.” His claim to adulation? Allegedly gunning down in open court an American accused of blasphemy, a capital crime in this Islamic republic. Khan is charged with murder, which also carries a death sentence. But while lawyers line up to defend him, the attorney for Tahir Naseem, the U.S. citizen, has gone...

CHARSADDA: A chemistry teacher who tried to protect his students by opening fire on Taliban militants during a deadly attack at the Bacha Khan University has been hailed as a "martyr" and a "gentleman". Lecturer Syed Hamid Hussain, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, ordered his students to stay inside as Taliban gunmen stormed the school near the city of Peshawar on Wednesday, leaving at least 21 people dead. Students told of how he opened fire on gunmen as they rampaged across campus, giving the young people time to flee before he was cut...

<p>Pakistan Wednesday hanged four men linked to the Taliban's massacre of more than 130 schoolchildren, with parents of victims saying they deserved "no forgiveness" as the attack anniversary approached.</p> <p>The executions, which officials said were carried out Wednesday morning at a prison in the northwestern city of Kohat, were the first in connection with the December 16 attack on an army-run school in the northwestern city of Peshawar. The army has put the final toll at 151 killed, 134 of them children.</p>

Another barbaric chapter of an epic conflict between the presence and promise of modernity, and the bitter, toxic romance of regression was written on January 7 in Paris. This war, raging across the world, is a confrontation between the lethal adrenalin of faith supremacy and belief that faith equality is the basis of civilised political and social stability. The epicentre of this war is within the Muslim successor states of the Mughal and Ottoman empires; but its destructive reach extends far beyond its immediate habitat. The warriors of this Islamic jihad are the masked vanguard of a movement that found...

A Pakistani court granted bail to a terrorist accused of planning the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, drawing loud protests from India. The suspect, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, is a senior commander with Laskar-e-Toiba, the group behind the blitz of attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that left 166 people dead.The slow pave of th trial has been a contniuing source of contention with India, which accuses te Pakistani authorities of tacitly supporting Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mr. Lakhvi's lawyer, said his client had been granted a release on bond of $5000.Indian officials protested the release and called for it to be immediately reversed. The...

The mind-numbing savagery of radical Islam plumbed new depths in Pakistan yesterday. Taliban terrorists shouting “Allahu akbar” attacked the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, slaughtering 142 people, including 132 children between the ages of six and 16. Another 10 staff members, including the principal, were also murdered. “They didn’t take any hostages initially and started firing in the hall,” said Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, a military spokesman.

A deadly, hours-long siege of a school in northwest Pakistan ended Tuesday evening with all the Taliban militants responsible killed, at least 130 people -- most of them children -- dead and a country once again grasping for answers after a horrific attack. Six suicide bombers scaled the walls of Army Public School and Degree College in the violence-plagued city of Peshawar around 10 a.m. (midnight ET) intent on killing older students there, according to Mohammed Khurrassani, a spokesman for the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistan Taliban. These Taliban had "300 to 400 people ... under their custody" at...

Lower Dir, 27 January 2014, Militants have changed their getups and they move to different residential areas after the operation in Fata and Baluchistan. Some of them start using shirts, paint to show him as modern. Some of militants also remove the hair and beard to hide their self in local communities. According to the source, militants left the tribal areas and use Bannu, DI khan and Hangu move other parts of Pakistan, they used unknown and unfamiliar ways of escaping the area. Some of them move also explosive vehicle for targeting government official. The source confirmed that the decision...

Peshawar, 15 January 2014 Peshawar Police official issue warning to wear the Helmet and Jacket during official duty, but the official want to kill us through terrorism, because the Helmet and Jacket didn’t protect us saying the Peshawar Police officer whose want to didn’t mention his name because he worried that police official will target him after telling the truth to the media. According to him the EX IGP Malik Naveed buys the weapon, Helmet and Jacket for the KP police, but that’s not protecting us from bullets. He said that every police officer bring 25 kilograms Jacket , that...

Peshawar, 11 January 2014, Electrical short circuit has burned the market in Peshawar, in the result of collapse of wall one person killed while three injured in the fire. The fire burns Saturday early morning in an old cloth market near Nothia Bazaar. According to the local police officer Sardar Hussain we received call on 4.45 that fire on two shops burn the shops and fire also damaged other shops. After the call we inform the Rescue worker and we reached the spot. The officer informs that we try to vacate the houses near to the market because fire burn...

Peshawar 16 December 2013 “We lost our teacher in the blast, whose teach us how to defuse the IED “. It’s the wording of police cops who’s attached with a bomb disposal unit in Peshawar, whose didn’t want to show himself because of security reason. After the blast in police van at Sheikh Mohammadi road, he reached to the spot and when he hears about that in charge bomb disposal unit along with 4 other police member of BDU lost lives, he starts weeping. He was angry that robot and vehicle which are given to the police department by US...

Peshawar, the Provincial doctors association has ended their protest after meeting with chief minister Khyber Pukhtoonkhawa Parvez Khattak. The announcement comes after a meeting in chief minister house on Saturday night. According to the detail groups of the doctor’s coordination committee has met the chief minister and discuss issues of the doctor safety & security. They also inform the CM KPK about the current situation of the doctor’s protest and said that doctors in KPK feel insecure after the kidnapping incident of Dr Amjad Takweem & Dr Mujahid Bangash. After these doctor kidnapping incidents provincial doctor associations & young doctors...

In 2003, eight years before Osama bin Laden was found and killed by U.S. Navy SEALs, Grand Rapids resident Tom Lee says he told federal investigators exactly where to find the world’s most wanted terrorist. That should qualify Lee for the $25 million award being offered for the successful capture of bin Laden, according to a letter his lawyers have sent to Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James B. Comey. “It disturbs me, and it should disturb every American, that I told them exactly where bin Laden was in 2003, and they let him live another eight years,” Lee said...

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a Christian church in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 72 people and wounding scores of others as they left services. The blast took place outside All Saints Church, which dates to the mid-1800s and is the oldest Christian church in Peshawar. Sunday’s attack occurred around 11 a.m., as more than 600 worshippers were leaving church grounds. According to security officials, the twin bombers detonated near the gate of the church, sending body parts and debris through the air. Sunday’s bombing may be the worst attack against Christians worshippers in Pakistan since...