Officials confirmed that five more injured of Friday’s blasts died in hospital, which pushed the corpse count to 72. At least 10 others are said to be in precarious condition.
Dozens of protesters offered their Eid prayers wearing black armbands in the market in Parachinar, where the bombs tore through crowds of shoppers on Friday, local officials said.
"The corpse count from Friday's blasts has reached 69," local administration official Basir Khan Wazir told AFP. He said the local administration was trying to negotiate with the protesters.
Parachinar, capital of
Kurram Agency...home of an intricately interconnected web of poverty, ignorance, and religious fanaticism, where the laws of cause and effect are assumed to be suspended, conveniently located adjacent to Tora Bora...
, a mainly Shia area in the tribal belt, had already suffered two deadly kabooms in its markets this year.
It was the site of the first major attack in Pakistain in 2017, when a bomb killed 24 people in January in an attack claimed by the banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
... a 'more violent' offshoot of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistain. LeJ's purpose in life is to murder anyone who's not of utmost religious purity, starting with Shiites but including Brelvis, Ahmadis, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Rosicrucians, and just about anyone else you can think of. They are currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of al-Qaeda ...
al-Alami and a splinter group of the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban
...the Pashtun equivalent of men...
Pakistain (TTP) led by Sheheryar Mehsud.
In March, a second attack in another market killed 22 people. The attack was claimed by the Jamaatul Ahrar
...A Pak Taliban
splintergroup that split off from the Mullah Fazlullah faction because it wasn't violent enough...
Friday's assault ─ also claimed by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami ─ brought the town's loss of life due to terror attacks up to 115, more than any one city in Pakistain has suffered so far this year.
"We have been a constant target of the Taliban but the government has always failed us," Muzamil Hussain, an activist from Parachinar told AFP Friday.
Authorities have said that after the first two attacks, checkposts and barriers were set up around the city's markets.
"I don't understand how can someone drive a bomb-laden vehicle through all the checkposts of the military and other paramilitary troops and reach here, it simply isn't logical, and this is what we are protesting against," he said.