Daily Times

At least 10 cops were martyred in another late-night terrorist attack on a police station in Dera Ismail Khan on Monday. Among the injured are an SHO and five more policemen.

According to the police, terrorists entered the Chodhwan police station after sniping officers standing guard around it. Inside the station, they hurled grenades as well as shot at police officers they encountered. Four of the martyred cops belonged to the Elite Force. They were identified as ASI Kausar, Ehteram, Rafiullah and Hameed-ul-Haq. Identities of the six other cops were revealed as Mohammad Aslam, Ghulam Farid, Mohammad Javed, Mohammad Idrees, Mohammad Imran and Mansoor.

The injured were identified as Ahmad Hussain, Akbar Zaman, Inayatullah, Sohrab Khan, Ibrahim and Naseeb Khan.

At around 3 am militants attacked the police station with sniper fire and then entered the building, said police officers in Pakistan’s Draban region in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, Reuters reported.

“After entering the building, the terrorists used hand grenades which caused more casualties to the police,” said Malik Anees ul Hassan, the deputy superintendent of police in Draban. As per the DSP, the SHO Chodhwan police station’s condition was stable. “More than 30 terrorists launched an attack from three directions. There was an exchange of fire for over two-and-a-half hours,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial police chief Akhtar Hayat Gandapur told AFP.

Gandapur told AFP the attackers briefly seized control of the police station during the assault in the early hours of Monday.

Following the attack, a clearance operation was initiated by police officers as well as military personnel. The latter had taken up security duties around the police station and were also leading a clearance operation in the forests nearby. The security officials set up checkpoints in DI Khan, and were carrying out snap-checking on the routes leading to and from South Waziristan and Darazinda.

The attack further complicates the security situation in K-P as the country heads to polls in four days. Last week, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) summoned an urgent meeting of security officials following the assassination of a National Assembly independent candidate in K-P’s Bajaur district and the killing of an ANP activist in Balochistan’s Qilla Abdullah.

A sudden spurt in violence — just eight days before the general elections — also saw a grenade attack on the election campaign office of PPP candidate, Ali Madad Jatak, on Quetta’s Sariab Road.

A similar grenade attack was carried out at the residence of another PPP candidate, Mir Zahoor Buledi, in Kech district of Balochistan. A day earlier, a bomb blast on a main road in Balochistan’s Sibi during an election rally led by Saddam Tareen, a PTI-affiliated independent candidate for NA-253 (Ziarat) constituency, left at least four people dead and five others injured.

The ECP told the media in Islamabad that it would meet with government and intelligence officials to discuss the worsening law and order situation in the two provinces. The attack also comes over a month after another one in which at least 23 soldiers were martyred after militants rammed an explosive-laden truck into a security forces’ post in Khyber-Paktunkhwa’s Dera Ismail Khan district. In a statement released after the attack, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said that the terrorists rammed the explosive-laden vehicle after their attempts to gain entry were “effectively thwarted”. The car bomb was followed by another suicide attack, leading to the collapse of the building, causing multiple casualties. Six terrorists were killed in the attack, said the ISPR.

Security forces were using the building as a base camp, two security officials told Reuters and added that they fear that ammunition stored inside might have also exploded.