PESHAWAR: At least three policemen have been killed in separate attacks in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the last two days, police officials said on Friday, amid a fresh bout of violence in the militancy-hit northwestern Pakistani region that borders Afghanistan.

In the latest incident, unidentified gunmen riding motorbikes shot an official of the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) in the Lakki Marwat district late Thursday, according to police spokesman Shahid Marwat.

The official was killed on the spot and the assailants managed to get away from the scene.

“CTD police officer Wahid Khan was martyred in an attack by unidentified terrorists in the jurisdiction of Nawrang police station,” Marwat told Arab News.

Earlier on Thursday, he said, a Levies paramilitary force official, Sharif Ullah, was shot dead in Tajazai, a dusty town on the outskirts of Lakki Marwat.

“Police are investigating whether it was a case of personal enmity or an act of militants,” the spokesman said.

Gunmen also killed a police constable in the Inayat Kallay bazaar of the Bajaur tribal district this week, police official Jaffar Khan told Arab News.

The deaths have brought the total number of police killings in ambushes and targeted attacks in the province to 59 this year.

While no group immediately claimed responsibility for the killings, suspicion is likely to fall on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has claimed dozens of recent attacks in the country’s militancy-prone northwest.

Pakistan has witnessed a renewed surge in militant violence in its two western provinces, KP and Balochistan, since the TTP called off its fragile truce with the government in November 2022.

Last Wednesday, unidentified gunmen killed a police official providing security to a polio team in Peshawar, the capital of the province.

A senior police officer told Arab News last week that more than 200 of his colleagues had been killed in targeted attacks in the last two years.

In May, gunmen shot dead a policeman in the restive North Waziristan tribal district, while six people, including five officials of the customs department, were killed and another was wounded when gunmen opened fire on their vehicle in the southern Dera Ismail Khan district of the province.

Pakistan has blamed the surge in violence on militants operating out of the neighboring Afghanistan. Kabul denies the allegation and says rising violence in Pakistan is a domestic issue of Islamabad.