Two bombs went off in Hangu within the same afternoon. The first went off at 2 p.m. on October 24 at a police checkpost in Hangu, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and nobody was inside. The second killed three officers.
Police Inspector General Zulfiqar Hameed said the checkpost, under Bilyamina police station, normally had no one posted there. Regional Police Officer Abbas Majeed explained that officers on a search and strike operation used it as a place to rest, and that police had cordoned off an area about 100 meters away since 10 a.m. When a police vehicle drove toward the scene after the first blast, a second improvised explosive device went off beside it. Authorities called it considerably more powerful than the first.
Two officers died on the spot. Asad Zubair, the superintendent of police for operations, was taken to hospital and died there. AP described the dead as a city police chief and two junior officers, and quoted local police chief Adam Khan as saying the convoy was on its way to a station attacked minutes earlier.
Who was blamed
Police attributed the attack to “Fitna-al-Khawarij,” the state’s name for the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi blamed the Pakistani Taliban and said the officers’ “sacrifice will not go in vain.” President Asif Ali Zardari said “India-backed” terrorists carried it out. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif repeated the government’s pledge to eliminate terrorism entirely.
Chief Minister Sohail Afridi asked for an immediate report and called an apex committee on law and order. “All resources will be used to establish peace,” he said.
A bad month on the border
Dawn tied the blasts to a rise in militant violence since the TTP ended its ceasefire with the government in November 2022. In the preceding days police stations in Bannu came under failed attack on October 19, a station in South Waziristan was hit with rockets and gunfire on October 18, and an explosive-laden rickshaw in Bannu was stopped on October 17, killing three attackers.
The same day, Pakistani forces raided a militant hideout in the Tank district and killed eight Pakistani Taliban fighters, AP reported. Islamabad accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government, in power in Kabul since August 2021, of sheltering the militants. Kabul denies it. Delegations were due in Istanbul after talks in Doha on October 19, and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi said Pakistan wanted “a concrete and verifiable monitoring mechanism.” His blunt summary: “We are not asking for the moon, we are just asking to end cross-border terrorism.”
All crossings between the two countries had been closed since October 13.
Sources
- SP, 2 other policemen martyred as back-to-back blasts rock KP's Hangu
- Roadside bombing kills 3 police officers in northwest Pakistan
