Eight people were killed, and five others sustained injuries on Saturday when a suicide bomber triggered an explosion at a checkpoint near Mir Ali, a town situated in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, close to the Afghan border.
The attacker detonated the bomb while riding on the back of a motorbike rickshaw, according to an unnamed local police officer who spoke to AFP.
The casualties included four police officers, two members of a state paramilitary force and two civilians. The police officer further stated that among the five wounded, three are in critical condition and have been moved to a nearby military hospital for treatment.
An unnamed local government official corroborated to AFP the reported number of fatalities and injuries resulting from the attack.
This comes a day after ten police officers were killed in an attack on a check post near the Afghan border. The attack happened in the Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. About 20 to 25 militants targeted the Frontier Constabulary post, a police assistance force. The Pakistan Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), claimed the attack in a statement to AFP.
Since the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has faced a surge in terrorism, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which border Afghanistan. Recent anti-terror operations in North Waziristan led to the elimination of about a dozen militants this month. In the most recent operation Pakistani security forces killed nine insurgents, including a high-level target, in a shootout overnight in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in the volatile northwestern region that borders Afghanistan, the military said Thursday.
According to a Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) report, violence increased sharply in 2024, with a 90% surge in fatalities in the third quarter alone. The year’s total fatalities, now at 722, have already surpassed all of 2023, with 97% occurring in these two provinces, marking the highest rate in a decade.
