42 Dead in Damascus Mosque Suicide Attack on pro-Regime Cleric, Opposition Calls it 'Crime'

A suicide bomb attack on a mosque in central Damascus on Thursday killed 42 people, including a prominent pro-regime Sunni cleric and his grandson, and wounded 84 others, Syria's health ministry said as the opposition's chief condemned the bombing as a "crime".

"The number of those martyred in the terrorist suicide attack in the Iman Mosque rises to 42 martyrs with 84 injured," a bulletin on state television said, citing the ministry.

"Senior cleric Dr Mohammed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti was martyred in a terrorist suicide attack at the Iman Mosque in Mazraa in Damascus," Syrian state media said, adding there were reports of more dead and wounded.

"Bouti was martyred while he was giving a religious lesson to religion students in the Iman Mosque," the station added.

The official al-Ikhbariya television station aired gruesome footage from inside the mosque, where dozens of corpses and body parts, including limbs and hands, were strewn on the carpeted floor.

The footage showed emergency workers collecting the remains from inside the mosque and carrying them out in grey body bags.

A presenter on the channel said a suicide bomber had entered the mosque and blown himself up.

Syria's opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib condemned the attack as a "crime", saying he suspected the regime was behind the attack.

"We categorically condemn the assassination of the scholar Dr Mohamed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti," he told Agence France Presse in Cairo on the phone. "This is a crime by any measure that is completely rejected."

"Whoever did this was a criminal... and we suspect it was the regime," he said, accusing President Bashar Assad's forces of killing another cleric, Riad al-Saad, a few days ago.

Khatib, himself a cleric, said he had known Bouti, who was widely esteemed for his erudition in Islamic theology, but had disagreed with him over his vociferous support for Assad.

"Our religion and values do not allow to treat differences of opinions through killings," he said.

Bouti was the most senior pro-regime Sunni cleric in Syria, and his weekly addresses at Friday prayers were frequently broadcast live on state television.

After news of the attack broke, one state television station interrupted its regular program to broadcast verses from the Koran, the Muslim holy book as well as footage of Bouti giving his weekly sermon.

Bouti, who comes from a major Kurdish family, was reviled by the opposition, and activists say he was forcibly ejected from a mosque in 2011 after saying most of the people who went out to protest after Friday prayers did not know how to pray.

He was born in 1929 and spent years studying Islamic theology, including at Cairo's al-Azhar University, according to state television.