DAMASCUS – A suicide bombing rocked a Damascus mosque on Thursday, killing at least 42 people including Syria’s most prominent Sunni cleric, state media and a watchdog group said.

The bomber blew himself up inside the Iman Mosque in central Damascus as the cleric, Mohamed al-Bouti, addressed religious students, in an attack that echoed the sectarian violence in Iraq. Bouti was the most senior pro-regime Sunni cleric in Syria whose weekly addresses at Friday prayers were frequently broadcast live on state television.

Mohamed al-Bouti.

“Senior cleric Dr. Mohammed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti was martyred in a terrorist suicide attack at the Iman Mosque in Mazraa,” a district of the capital, said state television. “Bouti was martyred while he was giving a religious lesson to religion students in the Iman Mosque.”

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 among pools of blood.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 42 people were killed in the attack in addition to Bouti, with dozens more wounded at the mosque in Mazraa, a district just north of the city center. State news agency SANA said at least 14 people had been killed in addition to Bouti, and more than 40 were hurt.

Born in 1929, Bouti was from a large Kurdish family and spent years studying Islamic theology, including at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, according to state television. He was reviled by the opposition, and frequently lashed out against the rebels seeking the overthrow of Assad’s regime, encouraging Syrians to join the national army to fight against the insurgents.