3 police officers killed in an attack by militants in northwestern Pakistan

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PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A group of militants armed with assault rifles attacked a police post in restive northwestern Pakistan before dawn on Thursday, killing three officers and wounding five before fleeing the scene, police said.

The attack occurred in Karak, a district in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan, local police official Abbas Khan said. He said officers also returned fire after coming under the attack.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Also overnight, security forces conducted an operation in North Waziristan, a district bordering Afghanistan, triggering an intense shootout in which 12 militants and a soldier were killed, the military said in a statement.

It said weapons and ammunition were also recovered from the killed insurgents.

Shafqat Ali Khan, a spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs, said Thursday that the body of one of the “terrorists” who was killed by Pakistani security forces has been handed over to the Afghan authorities. The man, he said, was the son of an Afghan government official in Afghanistan's western Badghis province. He provided no further details.

In a statement, Pakistan's Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned the attack and offered his condolences to the families of the killed police officers. He blamed the Pakistani Taliban for the attack.

Pakistan has in recent months witnessed a surge in militant attacks, most of them blamed on Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP. While the TTP is an ally of the Afghan Taliban who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, it’s a separate group.