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28 March 2024

Suicide attack kills six troops in Pakistan: police

Published
By AFP

A suicide car bomb attack in northwest Pakistan killed six soldiers and wounded about a dozen others on Saturday, police said.

The attack took place in Bannu city where the bomber targeted the camp office of the paramilitary Frontier Corps troops, who are deployed in militant-infested North Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan.

"The bomber drove his explosives-packed vehicle into the FC building," local police official Muhammad Shafiq told AFP.

He said the camp office was damaged in the attack.

Two local intelligence officials also confirmed the attack and feared the death toll could rise.

"There may be some more dead bodies lying under the debris of the single-storey building which was attacked from the back," they told AFP.

Senior local police official Feroz Shah said the death toll stood at six, from an initial toll of five killed and 12 wounded.

Bannu is 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack on the camp, which is a base for Frontier Corps troops, also known as the Tochi Scouts, before and after deployments in North Waziristan.

"We claim responsibility for the attack, which was launched to avenge the killing of one of our commanders Taj Gul in a US drone strike in South Waziristan tribal region last month," TTP spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP.

"Our attacks will continue against the security forces," he added.

Ehsan also claimed responsibility for an overnight attack on Thursday on a paramilitary Frontier Constabulary checkpost and said, "TTP is holding hostage at least 17 FC men."

Officials had confirmed that at least 15 soldiers went missing after the attack, but it was unclear whether they deserted or were kidnapped.

Washington has called Pakistan's semi-autonomous northwest tribal region the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda, where Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked networks need to be defeated if the 10-year war in Afghanistan is ever to end.

A covert US campaign of drone strikes against militants in the region has been halted following a Nato cross-border attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

The November air strikes plunged the precarious Pakistani-US alliance to its lowest ebb in a decade with both sides still in dispute about the precise sequence of events.

Islamabad has kept its Afghan border closed to Nato convoys since November 26, boycotted the Bonn conference on Afghanistan and ordered Americans to leave an air base understood to have been a hub for CIA drone strikes on the Taliban.

The Los Angeles Times said late Friday that the CIA had suspended drone attacks on gatherings of low-ranking militants due to tensions with Islamabad.

Citing unnamed current and former US officials, the newspaper said the undeclared halt in CIA attacks is aimed at reversing a sharp erosion of trust between the two countries.