By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: At least six security personnel were killed and several others wounded in separate attacks in the restive provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan on Thursday, as millions of Pakistanis voted in a tense and closely watched general election.
The attacks, which targeted police and paramilitary forces, underscored the persistent threat of violence and instability in the country, occoured despite the government blocked mobile and internet services in parts of the country as a security measure.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that borders Afghanistan and has been a hotbed of Islamist militancy, four police officers were killed when their patrol was hit by bomb blasts and gunfire in the Kulachi area of Dera Ismail Khan district, according to the local police chief, Rauf Qaisrani.
He said the area had been sealed off and a search operation was underway.
Media reports said another person was killed in a separate shooting incident in the neighboring Tank district, but no official confirmation was available.
The interim chief minister of the province, Justice (retd) Arshad Hussain Shah, condemned the attacks and said they would not deter the police from performing their duties.
In Balochistan, a province that has been wracked by a long-running separatist insurgency and sectarian violence, two members of the Levies force, a local paramilitary unit, and a police officer were killed when their vehicle struck a landmine while heading to a polling station in Kharan district, according to the district’s deputy commissioner, Munir Ahmed Soomro.
He said seven other security personnel were injured in the blast and some of them were shifted to Quetta, the provincial capital, for treatment.
The attacks came as a former lawmaker and leader of a Pashtun rights movement, Mohsin Dawar, wrote a letter to the chief election commissioner, Sikandar Sultan Raja, expressing alarm over the security situation in his constituency in North Waziristan, a tribal district that was once a stronghold of the Taliban and other militant groups.
Dawar, who heads the National Democratic Movement, a political party that emerged from the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, a civil rights campaign, said in the letter, which he posted on his social media platform X, that militants had been threatening the locals and the polling staff in the area.
He said three of his female polling agents had narrowly escaped attacks on the morning of the election day and claimed that the Taliban had taken control of some polling stations. He said he had written a similar letter to the district returning officer but it was ignored.
“The election commission has to take urgent notice of the situation and take necessary action to ensure the safety of the locals and the polling staff.”
Pakistan has witnessed a surge in terrorist attacks in recent weeks, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. On Wednesday, at least 28 people were killed and dozens wounded in two back-to-back attacks on political parties election offices in Qila Saifullah and Pishin districts of Balochistan. A day earlier, a prominent religious leader and candidate, Hafiz Hamdullah, survived a gun attack on his vehicle near Chaman, a border town in the province.
According to the statistics issued by the Department of Interior and Tribal Affairs of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the areas most affected by terrorism in the province include Peshawar, the provincial capital, Khyber, Bajaur, and Tank districts, as well as Dera Ismail Khan and the former tribal districts of North Waziristan and South Waziristan, which were merged with the province in 2018.
The department said that a total of 1,050 incidents of terrorism took place in the province last year, of which 419 occurred in the settled districts and 631 in the merged districts.
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