Armed militants in Pakistan stormed a police station in the city of Wana in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s South Waziristan district in the early hours of Tuesday and escaped after looting arms and ammunition, media reports said.
Militants armed with rocket launchers and heavy weapons forced their way into the police station in Wana, the Dawn newspaper reported. A policeman inside at the time of the attack told Dawn that around 50 militants entered the station after blowing up the front gate.
According to the Pakistani publication, heavily outnumbered in front of militants, around 20 policemen, resisted for some time but were later taken hostage.
The report said that the latest attack created panic in the area and locals expressed their dismay over it. “The public wants neither good nor bad Taliban. It wants the rule of law in their area,” said Shakir Khan, a local elder.
The US exit from Afghanistan last year had bolstered Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) activities with its base in the war-torn country still intact, Pakistan’s counter-terrorism authority in Islamabad told the country’s Senate Standing Committee on Interior this month.
The TTP gained considerable ground and increased its footprint and magnitude of activities during the peace talks process, The News International newspaper reported.
Amid the resurgence in terror incidents in the country, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised to deal with the problem with “iron hands”. He said that the state would not bow down to any militant groups.
Shehbaz said that the problem of terrorism was a “sensitive issue of national security” and called for “collective thinking” and a “national action plan” to curb the recent rise in terror activities, according to a statement carried out by state-run Radio Pakistan.
The federal government would also address the “external facilitation of terrorists who disseminate and support it in Pakistan”, he added.