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A suicide bomber struck a busy intersection near a police station in Pakistan's Swat district on Sunday, killing nine people and wounding 20 others, police said, in the latest attack to target security forces in the restive northwest of the country.
The bomber detonated his explosive vest at a crowded crossroads where a civil society protest was underway, according to Fida Hussain, Swat's Deputy Inspector General of Police. Four of the dead were police officers. Seven of the 20 wounded were in critical condition, Hussain said.
The attacker had attempted to force his way into the police station at the intersection before officers stopped him at the gate. "A suicide bomber attempted to enter the police station located at the chowk, but was stopped by police at the main gate," Hussain told AFP. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hours later in Peshawar, the provincial capital, a homemade bomb wounded four police officers. That attack was claimed by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban militant group, the city's police chief told AFP.
The twin attacks come days after a military spokesman said that militant attacks and ensuing security operations had killed 819 security personnel and civilians so far this year.
Both Swat and Peshawar fall within Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the northern border province where authorities have been battling a growing insurgency by the TTP. The group, formed in 2007, has historically concentrated its attacks on security forces and installations in the province, which shares a long border with Afghanistan. Its activity surged following the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021, and it has since expanded operations beyond its traditional strongholds in the northwest.
The TTP primarily targets Pakistani security personnel and has carried out some of Pakistan's deadliest attacks in recent years, including a 2023 assault on police headquarters in Peshawar that killed more than 80 people.
Islamabad has long accused Kabul of allowing militants to operate from Afghan territory, a charge the Taliban government in Afghanistan denies. The dispute has fueled an increasingly bitter rift between the two neighboring countries and has at times escalated into armed confrontation. Pakistan has conducted air strikes it says target militant positions on Afghan soil.
The Taliban government in Kabul and the United Nations both said dozens of civilians were killed in Pakistani strikes on eastern Afghanistan in June, an episode that deepened tensions between the two governments.
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