Roadside bombing kills 3 police officers in northwest Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A powerful roadside bomb struck a police vehicle Friday in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in the country’s northwest near the Afghan border, killing a city police chief and two junior officers, officials said.

The bombing took place in the city of Hangu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province as the officers were heading to a police station that had been attacked less than an hour earlier, local police chief Adam Khan said. He gave no further details.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned the attacks and blamed them on the Pakistani Taliban, which is a separate group but a close ally of Afghanistan’s Taliban, which returned to power in Kabul in August 2021 after the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.

Pakistan accuses Kabul of allowing Pakistani Taliban militants based in Afghanistan to carry out cross-border attacks. Kabul denies the charge, saying it does not allow its territory to be used against other countries.

Also on Friday, Pakistani security forces raided a militant hideout in the northwestern Tank district and killed eight Pakistani Taliban militants, the military said in a statement.

The latest violence came a day before Pakistan and Afghanistan are scheduled to hold a second round of peace talks in Istanbul, following an initial meeting in Qatari capital Doha on Oct. 19. Those talks, brokered by Qatar and Turkey, followed deadly border clashes that left dozens dead on both sides and led to a temporary ceasefire that remains in place.

In Islamabad, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi said Friday that the recent talks in Doha focused on ways of bringing an immediate halt to cross-border violence, and that talks Saturday in Istanbul will be aimed at establishing “a concrete and verifiable monitoring mechanism.”

“We are not asking for the moon, we are just asking to end cross-border terrorism,” Andrabi told a news conference.

All border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been closed since Oct. 13 due to the recent border clashes, and Andrabi said he knows that closure affects trade between the sides, but said that safety is more important.

“When armed attacks take place along these trading points, killing Pakistanis, then the lives of our people are more important than any commodity trade,” Andrabi said.

Pakistan and Afghanistan share a 2,611-kilometer (1,622-mile) border known as the Durand Line, which Afghanistan has never formally recognized.

Elsewhere in Pakistan, in the southwestern Balochistan province, insurgents kidnapped 13 construction workers in the Khuzdar district, according to a local police official.

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Ahmed reported from Islamabad. Abdul Sattar contributed to this story from Quetta, Pakistan.