PESHAWAR: At least four people were killed and 10 were injured in the northwestern Pakistani district of Khyber on Thursday after two suicide bombers attacked a compound that housed a police station and several government offices, the police said.

The attack took place in the Bara neighborhood of Khyber district, which borders Afghanistan. Police said one of the suicide bombers blew himself up while the suicide vest of the other bomber detonated after the police shot him.

Thursday’s attack came hours after militants of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or the Pakistani Taliban shot and killed two police officers and wounded two others in an overnight gun attack at a roadside checkpoint in the northwestern city of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. 

“Two suicide blasts have occurred at the gate of a compound where government offices and the Bara Police station are located,” a spokesperson for Khyber Police, Zaheer Khan, told Arab News, adding that the area had been cordoned off and a search operation was ongoing.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement.

Bilal Faizi, the spokesperson for Rescue 1122 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, told Arab News four people were killed in the attack.

District Khyber was a part of the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) but was later merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018. It was for long a stronghold of TTP militants who have carried out some of the deadliest attacks against Pakistan’s security forces.

Militancy in the district declined following the Pakistan Army’s operations there, but with the return of the Afghan Taliban to power in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2021, the South Asian country has seen an uptick in violence in border areas, particularly after a fragile truce between the TTP and the state broke down in November last year.

On Tuesday, eight people were injured when militants targeted the vehicle of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) in Peshawar.