Hameed, the provincial police chief, said more than a dozen police officers were guarding the mosque when the attack occurred, and Haq's seminary also had its own security.
Also on Friday, a roadside bomb exploded near a vehicle carrying security forces in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, wounding 10 people, including two troops, police and officials said.
A suicide bomber blew himself up after walking into a mosque within a pro-Taliban seminary in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing a top cleric and four other worshippers and wounding dozens of others ahead of the fasting month of Ramadan, according to local police.
As many as 101 people, mostly police officers, were killed in 2023 when a suicide attack targeted a mosque in Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The slain cleric Haq is the son of Maulana Samiul Haq, known as the “father of the Taliban,” who was killed in a knife attack at his home in 2018.
