Suicide bombing at Pakistan Islamic seminary kills six, including Taliban-linked cleric

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By Mushtaq Ali

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed six worshippers during Friday prayers at an Islamic seminary in northwestern Pakistan known as a historic training ground for the Afghan Taliban, police and a government spokesman said.

The head of the religious school was among those killed, said provincial government spokesman Muhammad Ali Saif.

The dead man, Maulana Hamid-ul-Haq, was the son of the late Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, considered the father of the Taliban.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The attacker, wearing an explosive-laden suicide vest, walked up to Haq as he was leaving a mosque on the premises of the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, his brother Maulana Abdul Haq told Reuters.

“Maulana Hamid-ul-Haq… died on the spot and around two dozen people were injured in the blast,” he said.

Regional police officer Najeebur Rahman said earlier that several people were wounded.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the bombing, and expressed sorrow over Haq’s death, in a statement issued by his office.

Tucked away in a dusty Pakistani town off the main motorway leading to the Afghan border, Darul Uloom Haqqania university was the launch pad for the Taliban movement in the 1990s. It is still often described as an incubator for radical Islamists.

Pakistan is battling twin insurgencies, one mounted by Islamists and the other by ethnic militants seeking secession over what they say is the government’s unfair division of natural resources.

(Reporting by Mushtaq Ali and Asif Shahzad; Writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by YP Rajesh, Saad Sayeed, Kevin Liffey and Frances Kerry)