At least 10 Pakistan frontier police personnel were killed in an intense shootout in a militant attack in northwest Pakistan, authorities said on Friday.
The attack, which took place near a security outpost in Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province overnight on Thursday, also wounded other security forces, local police official Abdul Rauf said.
A large group of militants stormed the outpost and killed members of the frontier constabulary security force, according to three senior police sources who confirmed the attack to Reuters.
The assailants suffered casualties but fled along with their dead and injured accomplices when authorities dispatched reinforcements to the security post in the town of Draban, Mr Rauf said.
Ali Amin Gandapur, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, confirmed the attack and paid tributes to the security forces killed and offered condolences to their families.
Islamist militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The group, a prominent regional rival of the Taliban carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, said the attack was retaliation for the killing of a senior leader, Ustad Qureshi, just 24 hours before by the Pakistan security forces.
Qureshi, regarded as a senior commander by the TTP, was among the nine killed in an intelligence-based operation, which also killed two suicide bombers in the Bajaur district bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military said on Thursday.
The Pakistan military’s security forces shot and killed a total of 19 insurgents within 24 hours in two separate operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Bajaur and Mianwali city in eastern Punjab.
Security forces recently have been conducting intelligence-based operations against Pakistani Taliban, who are known as TTP and have been emboldened since the Afghan Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.
The TTP is separate from the Afghan Taliban movement, but pledges loyalty to the Islamist group that now rules Afghanistan after US-led international forces withdrew in 2021.
According to Islamabad, the TTP uses Afghanistan as a base and says the ruling Taliban administration has provided safe havens to the group close to the border. The Taliban refute the allegations.