ISLAMABAD: Akhtar Hayat Khan, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) for the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has said this week suicide bombers in up to 75 percent of attacks in Pakistan this year were Afghan nationals.

Grappling with an economic crisis of its own and a sharp rise in terror attacks, Pakistan’s government is increasingly anxious about the presence of Afghans in the country.

Estimating that there were 1.73 million Afghan immigrants living in Pakistan without legal status, Pakistan’s caretaker government on Tuesday set a Nov. 1 deadline for them to leave or face forcible expulsion.

The Taliban government in Kabul has called Islamabad’s threat to expel Afghans “unacceptable,” saying they were not to blame for Pakistan’s security problems.

In an interview to Geo News, KP IGP Khan said forensics collected for suicide attacks this year had revealed Afghan involvement in a majority of cases, saying 49 out of 76 cases had been solved.

“The cases of suicide bombers, out of them, in 70-75 percent cases the suicide bomber turned out to be an Afghan,” Khan said, adding that authorities had arrested both Afghan and local suspects.

Officials say hundreds of thousands of Afghans have traveled to Pakistan since foreign forces left Afghanistan and the Taliban took over Kabul in 2021. Even before then, Pakistan hosted some 1.5 million registered refugees, one of the largest such populations in the world, according to the United Nations refugee agency. More than a million others are estimated to live in Pakistan unregistered.

Police last month launched a crackdown against those they say are living in Pakistan without legal documents, arresting hundreds of Afghans.

“Illegal citizens, illegal immigrants that are staying in Pakistan via illegal means, we have given them a deadline of November 1,” Interior Minister Sarfaraz Bugti told reporters at a briefing after a meeting chaired by the prime minister on Tuesday.

The meeting was held days after suicide bombers separately hit two mosques last week in Mastung and Hangu, killing 65 people.

“They [illegal immigrants] should return to their respective countries by November 1 voluntarily and if they don’t, the state’s law enforcement, whether they be provincial governments or federal government institutions, we will deport them via this enforcement.”

Pakistan’s crackdown against illegal foreigners takes place in the backdrop of a rise in militant attacks, especially since the Afghan Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021. Islamabad says the Pakistani Taliban have become emboldened with the Taliban in power and launch attacks against Pakistan from Afghan soil.

Afghanistan says it does not allow its soil to be used by militants.