The problem of compressive detection of multiple targets in a passive bistatic radar system consisting of one illuminator of opportunity and one receiver is considered. Specifically, a measurement matrix is designed to remove the direct-path and multi-path interference and obtain the compressive observations simultaneously. Considering that the degree of sparsity, that is, the number of targets, is unknown, an orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based detector, referred to as the ‖r k ‖ ∞ -based OMP detector, is proposed by analysing the distribution characteristics of the infinite norm of the residual. It is shown that the test statistic of the proposed detector leads to an order statistic, and then a closed-form expression of probability of false alarm and detection of the proposed detector is provided. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the performance of the proposed detector relative to several benchmark detectors.