PESHAWAR: Two policemen were killed and three others sustained injuries in two separate attacks by militants in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province on Sunday, police said.

The northwestern Pakistani province, which borders Afghanistan, has been the scene of a number of attacks on police, security forces, and anti-polio vaccination teams in recent weeks.

In the first attack, a police mobile van of Bragai police station came under attack by militants during a routine patrol in the Lakki Marwat district, according to district police spokesman Shahid Marwat.

“Armed terrorists opened indiscriminate fire on the police mobile van near Sayed Azam Petrol Pump, leaving police officer Nisar Ahmad dead,” Marwat told Arab News.

“Three policemen, including Station House Officer (SHO) Shakir Khan, were wounded who were in stable condition at a district’s medical facility.”

The second attack took place in the Bajaur tribal district, in which a traffic police officer was critically injured when unidentified gunmen riding a motorbike opened fire on him, police said.

“The traffic police officer succumbed to his wounds on way to hospital,” Jaffar Shah, a police officer in Bajaur, told Arab News.

While no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, suspicion is likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban, or the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who have claimed a number of attacks in KP in recent months.

Pakistan initially witnessed a spike in militant violence in its two western provinces, KP and Balochistan, since the Pakistani Taliban called off their fragile truce with the government in November 2022. The group has intensified its attacks recently.

Islamabad blames the latest surge in violence on neighboring Afghanistan, saying Pakistani Taliban leaders have taken refuge there and run camps to train insurgents to launch attacks inside Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban rulers in Kabul say rising violence in Pakistan is a domestic issue for Islamabad and it does not allow militants to operate on its territory.

The latest deaths have brought the total number of police killings in ambushes and targeted attacks in the volatile province this year to 68, according to police.

On Friday, Pakistani security forces killed three militants and injured one during an intelligence-based operation in KP’s North Waziristan district, according to the military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

Pakistani forces were able to effectively dismantle the TTP and kill most of its top leadership in a string of military operations from 2014 onwards in KP’s tribal areas, driving most of the fighters into neighboring Afghanistan, where Islamabad says they have regrouped. Kabul denies this.