By Staff Reporter
PESHAWAR: A police officer has been killed and three of his colleagues wounded after gunmen opened fire on a counter-terrorism raid on the outskirts of Peshawar, in an operation that authorities say thwarted a major suicide bombing plot.
The officer, Afaaq Khan, was fatally wounded on Thursday when his unit from the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) moved into the Garhi Sherdad area near Warsak Road, on the northern fringes of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial capital, after receiving intelligence that militants were hiding out there.
A senior CTD official said the raiding party had barely reached the area when it was met with gunfire. “The moment the CTD team reached the area, the terrorists opened fire at the raiding party,” the official said.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police said in a statement that one CTD officer had been martyred and three others injured in the exchange of fire that followed. One militant was shot dead in retaliatory action, while the force said its personnel had foiled a “major terrorist plot”.
Officers said the raid had been launched on “credible intelligence” that three suicide bombers were sheltering in the area — a detail that has coloured much of the response to Thursday’s operation. Two of the men are understood to remain at large, though police have not given further details of the ongoing search.
Dramatic aerial footage, filmed by a police quadcopter and shared alongside the CTD’s statement, appeared to show one of the militants scrambling across rooftops in an attempt to evade the cordon, leaping from the roof of one house to another before being cornered. He was shot as he reached the main door of a third property, having been tracked from above throughout, and was killed on top of a boundary wall by officers who had sealed off the surrounding streets.
The wounded officers were taken to Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, where a hospital spokesman, Muhammad Asim, said they were in a stable condition and continuing to receive treatment. Constable Khan’s funeral was held on Thursday at Peshawar police headquarters, drawing senior figures from across the province’s political and security establishment.
Thursday’s clash is the latest in a run of violent confrontations between security forces and militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that borders Afghanistan and has for years borne the brunt of Pakistan’s long-running fight against Islamist insurgency.
Meanwhile, security forces said on Thursday that they had killed eight militants in a separate intelligence-led operation in North Waziristan, further west along the Afghan border, where the state says fighters had attempted to use a mosque as cover during the raid. The operation, security sources said, was carried out “with precision” in order to avoid damaging the mosque, and also destroyed hideouts used by the group.
The militants involved were described by security sources as belonging to “Fitna al Khawarij” — the official designation used by the state for the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the umbrella militant network responsible for a large share of the violence in Pakistan’s north-west and along its border with Afghanistan.
The interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, praised the operation, saying security forces remained committed to eliminating the group. “KP is on the front line against terrorism, and the security forces are determined to uproot terrorism from its roots,” he said, adding: “We are proud of the brave sons of the security forces who foiled the terrorists’ nefarious designs.”
The past month has seen a marked escalation in militant activity across both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the neighbouring province of Balochistan, prompting authorities in both regions to step up counter-terrorism operations. According to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), an Islamabad-based think tank that tracks militant violence, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — excluding its formerly semi-autonomous tribal districts — recorded 54 terrorist attacks in August, up 50 per cent on the 36 recorded the previous month. Nationally, PICSS recorded 199 attacks across Pakistan in August, up 38 per cent on July, though the think tank noted that the resulting death toll had in fact fallen sharply over the same period, from 268 to 158.
The rise in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa attacks has coincided with a series of large-scale operations along the Afghan frontier. In the days spanning 31 August and 1 September, the military said security forces killed 15 militants attempting to cross into North Waziristan from Afghanistan, before eliminating a further 10 who had gone to ground in the area. According to the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the military’s media wing, a further seven militants were killed in a separate encounter in North Waziristan after their movements along the border were detected.
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