What happened
Pakistan arrested four facilitators of Friday’s suicide bombing at an imambargah in Islamabad, including the alleged mastermind, in overnight raids in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi told a news conference at Safe City Islamabad on Saturday 7 February 2026. The minister said multiple agencies, working with the KP Counter-Terrorism Department, detained the suspects before 3am in operations spanning Peshawar’s Chamkani and Charsadda Road localities and the Hakeem Abad area of Nowshera. A KP police assistant sub-inspectar, Ijaz Khattak, was martyred during the raids and three personnel were wounded.
Naqvi identified the alleged mastermind as an Afghan national affiliated with Daesh whom he said had received training in Afghanistan. The militant Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on Telegram on Saturday, as the death toll from Friday’s blast at Imambargah Khadijah al-Kubra in Tarlai rose to 36.
Why it matters
The arrests lift the veil on what Pakistani officials have cast as a cross-border plot. Investigators said the suicide bomber, identified through remains recovered at the blast site and traced through Nadra to his mother, had travelled to Afghanistan seven times and wore explosives strapped to his chest and legs. He moved from Nowshera to Islamabad via Rawalpindi and Khanna on Friday, the sources said, carrying out reconnaissance of the imambargah before the attack. Raids on a hideout in Dhok Kalakhan, on a suspected facilitator’s home in Nowshera, and on a Karachi-based contact who allegedly arranged conference calls between group members led investigators to six facilitators in KP and a seventh in Sindh.
Naqvi cast the network as part of a wider footprint of “21 terrorist organisations” operating from Afghanistan and alleged that India had tripled its funding of such networks since May. He said the bomber’s travel history “tells everything” about how he was trained, and that Islamabad’s security system would be upgraded in light of the attack, including reviewing how roughly 80 per cent of Islamabad police personnel — who are over 50 years old — are deployed. The government separately said it would ask social-media platforms to block extremist accounts, warning of unilateral action if they did not comply. The wider counter-terrorism posture under which the arrests were made is the same one the federal government has applied to the Balochistan counter-offensive launched weeks earlier, which culminated in the recapture of Nushki on 4 February (KhabarWire coverage).
What is still uncertain
The official IS claim could not be independently verified from open sources on Saturday, and the investigation’s central assertion that the mastermind was an Afghan national trained in Afghanistan rests on the minister’s statement and on investigators’ tracing of the bomber’s identity through Nadra. The provincial breakdown of the fatalities was still being compiled, with hospitals reporting at least 149 victims brought to Pims and the Polyclinic. Separately, mourners and political leaders in Quetta demanded comprehensive security for places of worship and called for those responsible to be brought to justice, signalling that the political aftermath would extend well beyond the arrests.
Sources & reporting notes
This article is a synthesis of published reporting on the day-after investigation into the 6 February 2026 Islamabad imambargah bombing, not eyewitness reconstruction. Sources were reviewed on 7 February 2026.
- Dawn — Capital bombing ‘mastermind’ among four held8 February 2026 · Munawer Azeem and Umer Farooq reporting from Islamabad and Peshawar; Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s Safe City press conference, the IS Telegram claim, the overnight KP raids, the death toll rising to 36, and investigation details sourced to KP police.
- Geo News — Fatalities rise to 33 in Islamabad imambargah suicide blast; funeral prayers held7 February 2026 · Day-of casualty and funeral reporting from Pims and the federal capital; Iranian Ambassador Raza Amiri Moghaddam’s condolence call to DPM Ishaq Dar and Azerbaijan FM Jeyhun Bayramov’s parallel condolence call.
