By Staff Reporter
PESHAWAR: Security forces killed six suspected militants in a hillside firefight in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Wednesday, officials said, after intelligence tracked the same group believed responsible for a recent attack on a police checkpost that left a constable dead.
The Counter-Terrorism Department and Lower Dir district police said they had sealed off the area following the assault on the Badwan Bridge checkpost, in which Constable Mohammad Ismail was killed, before receiving information that a militant cell had taken refuge in the surrounding hills. When officers moved in to make arrests, the suspects opened fire.
“The terrorists opened indiscriminate fire on police parties,” the CTD said in a statement, adding that officers returned fire and that the exchange lasted for an extended period. All six men were found dead in the search operation that followed. Six Kalashnikov rifles, three hand grenades and multiple rounds of ammunition were recovered from the bodies. Officers were continuing to hunt for accomplices who had fled the area, the CTD said.
The provincial police chief, Inspector General Zulfiqar Hameed, praised both units and vowed that operations “will continue with full force until terrorism is eradicated from the province and that the writ of the state will be maintained.”
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, in a post on X, praised the “professional expertise” of the CTD and police “for sending six terrorists to hell.”
Pakistan uses the Arabic term Fitna al-Khawarij — roughly meaning a religiously deviant faction — as its official designation for the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, in government and security communications. The CTD identified the slain men using that label and said they were wanted in multiple terrorism cases.
The killings come against a backdrop of worsening security across Pakistan’s conflict-prone northwest and southwest. The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies said in a monthly assessment that the country recorded 128 terrorist attacks in May, a 27 percent rise from 101 in April, reversing a downward trend that had held through the two previous months. The report identified KP and Balochistan as the hardest-hit regions, where militants routinely target security forces and police.
Security forces have sharply intensified operations across KP in recent weeks in response. On June 13, the military’s media wing said forces had killed 27 militants within a 72-hour window in the Miranshah area of North Waziristan district, close to the Afghan frontier and long a stronghold of TTP activity. Earlier this month, a suspected militant commander described as a close associate of TTP figure Akhtar Muhammad was killed in a separate operation in Bannu district.
The TTP, which seeks to impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law across Pakistan and has waged a two-decade insurgency against the state, sharply escalated attacks after abandoning a ceasefire in late 2022 and has since made security forces its primary target.
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