Hundreds of police were attending afternoon prayers in what should have been a tightly controlled compound in the northwest city of Peshawar on Monday when the blast erupted, causing a wall to collapse and crush officers.

"Those on duty didn't check him because he was in a police uniform [...] It was a security lapse," Moazzam Jah Ansari, the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province Police force, told a news conference. 

Police have a "fair idea" about who the bomber was after matching his head found at the scene with CCTV images.

"There's an entire network behind him," Ansari said, explaining that the bomber had not planned the assault alone. 

Authorities are investigating how a major breach could happen in one of the most-sensitive areas of the city, which houses intelligence and counter-terrorism bureaus and is next door to the regional secretariat.

It is Pakistan's deadliest assault in several years and the worst since violence began to resurge in the region after the Afghan Taliban takeover in Kabul in 2021.

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