Three people have been killed, including two policemen and a cook, in a terrorist attack on a police checkpost in the Khyber district of Pakistan, Dawn reported on Friday.
The police checkpost on which the attack took place was situated in Jamrud Tehsil of Khyber district in Peshawar Division of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Dawn quoted Khyber DPO Mohammad Imran as saying that terrorists conducted a coordinated attack at the Takhtabeg checkpost on the main Peshawar-Torkham Highway at around 7:30 pm (local time).
The assailants, one of them a suicide bomber, first threw hand grenades at the police station before opening fire randomly, killing one police officer there and badly injuring two others, among them a cook.
“One of the injured policemen succumbed to his injuries while being shifted to the hospital while the cook died at Hayatabad Medical Complex in Peshawar later,” said the DPO. The two martyred policemen included Younas Khan and Manzoor Shah while the cook was identified as Rafiq, all hailing from Jamrud, reported Dawn.
As a whole Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province experienced an exponential rise in violence whereby the fatalities there went up by 108 per cent.
According to the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), total fatalities from terrorist violence were as many as 973 – a 14.47 per cent spike compared to 2021, last year.
The major percentage of victims of violence were civilians, government officials, and security personnel while the militants, insurgents and other outlaws were counted for the remaining 38 per cent of all fatalities this year.