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28 March 2024

Gunmen attack police offices in Pakistan

Published
By Reuters
Gunmen attacked Pakistani police offices in the eastern city of Lahore on Thursday, a provincial government official said.

"Reportedly, four men attacked the FIA building and initial reports are that two of them have been killed," Punjab province Home (interior) Secretary Nadeem Hassan Asif told reporters, referring to the Federal Investigation Agency.

One television channel said two people had been taken hostage and there were unconfirmed reports of gun fire at a second police station in the city.

Gunmen had also attacked a second police station in the city, an official said.

A suicide car-bomber attackd the same FIA building in Lahore in March last year killing 21 people.

Shortly before the attack in Lahore, a suicide car bomber set off his explosives outside a police station in the northwestern town of Kohat on Thursday killing 10 people, police and military officials said.

"Some school children are among the dead," a policeman at the scene said.

Earlier, a suspected US drone aircraft fired two missiles at a house in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border on Thursday, killing four militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The violence came as the Pakistani army is preparing an offensive against Pakistani Taliban militants in neighbouring South Waziristan.

The government says most attacks in the country -- including four major ones since Oct. 5 that killed more than 100 people -- are plotted in South Waziristan on the Afghan border.

The drone fired at a house 3 km (2 miles) north of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, and at least three Afghan Taliban members were among the four dead, the officials said.

"The owner of the house is a member of the Haqqani network," said one of the intelligence officials, referring to veteran Afghan militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose men attack foreign forces in much of eastern Afghanistan.

The United States, struggling with an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan and frustrated with Pakistan's failure to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries on its side of the border, stepped up attacks by its drones in September last year.

It has launced 42 drone strikes this year compared with 32 last year, according to a Reuters tally of reports from Pakistani security and district government officials and residents.

Hundreds of people, most of them militants but including some civilians, have been killed.

Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed by a U.S. drone in August.

Pakistan officially objects to the drone strikes, saying they violate its sovereignty. It also worries the strikes could undermine efforts to deal with militancy because civilian casualties inflame public anger. 

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