AFP

Islamabad

Pakistan police yesterday killed seven Taliban insurgents during a raid in the port city of Karachi, police said.

The encounter took place in the Sohrab Goth area on the outskirts of the city after police received intelligence information about the presence of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insurgents in a compound there.

“There were up to 16 TTP militants present in the house when we raided it,” senior local police official Rao Anwar said.

He said the raid triggered a gunfight, killing seven insurgents, adding that three of them were involved in the assassination of a senior Karachi police official Chaudhry Aslam in January this year.

“These three militants, who had fled to Saudi Arabia after Aslam’s murder but returned home just recently, were experts of making bombs and suicide vests,” Anwar said.

Police were trying to identify the four others who were killed. At least seven militants fled during the gunfight, he said.

The raid came two weeks after a senior police official Farooq Awan, who has been a key player in the police’s fight against terrorist groups in the city since 2001, survived a car bomb attack in Karachi.

Karachi, a city of 18mn people which contributes 42% of Pakistan’s GDP, has been plagued by sectarian, ethnic and political violence for years.

On Saturday, at least five people were killed and 25 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a minority Shia colony in southwestern Baluchistan province of Pakistan, police said.

The suicide bomber struck around the sunset in Quetta city’s Hazara town home to the ethnic Shia Hazara community.

“I can confirm death of five people including a child and a woman in the suicide attack in Hazara town. Up to 25 people including seven children and three women got injured,” Quetta police chief Abdul Razzak Cheema told AFP.

“The suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded bazar where people were busy in shopping for the religious festival of Eid al-Adha,” Cheema said. 

“We have sent teams to the area to rescue the injured and investigate details of the attack,” Cheema said.

The minority Shia Afghan Hazara community has been attacked on many occasions and travel accompanied by security squads to avoid killings. 

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but extremist Sunni sectarian militants have attacked the Shia minority community in the past.

Resource-rich Baluchistan is home to sectarian violence against Shias and a long-running separatist conflict that was revived in 2004, with nationalists seeking to stop what they see as the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and alleged rights abuses.

 

 

 

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