Taliban strikes target police in north Pakistan

Pakistan Taliban militants on Thursday launched an audacious bomb and armed attack on two police compounds in the northern city of Bannu in North West Frontier Province, prompting fresh warnings that Islamic militants have the capability to strike at supposedly well protected targets.

A doctor at Bannu’s main hospital told Reuters new agency that 15 people had been killed and about 20 wounded people had been brought in. ”Seven police are among the dead,” said a Bannu police officer. The town’s police chief was among the wounded, police added.
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A senior Pakistani intelligence officer said the attack appeared to be in retaliation for last month’s reported killing of Taliban militant leader Hakimullah Mehsud. “The Taliban are determined to seek revenge from innocent people for the death of their leader,” he said.

Thursday’s attacks came just a day after a suicide car bomber attacked a group of paramilitary soldiers in the northwestern Khyber region just outside Peshawar on Wednesday, killing at least 19 people including 11 policeman.

Thursday’s attack came on the day when James Jones, US national security adviser, met President Asif Ali Zardari. Though no details of the meeting were publicly given, a senior Pakistan foreign ministry official said part of the discussion involved the matter of Pakistan’s potential support to bridge differences between Taliban militants in Afghanistan and the regime of Afghan president Hamid Karzai backed by the US and its NATO allies.

“We are obviously well placed to facilitate a dialogue which eventually helps bring an end to this conflict” he said.

However, western diplomats in Islamabad warned, the Taliban operating on Pakistani soil were likely to become increasingly ferocious in carrying out their attacks after a year of increasingly bloody confrontation with the country’s military. In recent weeks, some western officials have privately criticised Pakistan’s security forces for not taking their fighter deeper inside the tribal region beyond areas which were targeted till the end of last year.

The Pakistani Taliban, allies of the Afghan Taliban, have lost much ground in military offensives over the past year but they have responded with numerous bomb attacks, many of them aimed at the security forces.

There has been speculation over the Taliban leader’s fate since January 14 when security officials said a missile-firing US drone had targeted him. A drone was believed to have attacked him again three days later, officials said.

The government had ”credible information” that Mehsud was dead, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Wednesday.

A Taliban spokesman has denied that Mehsud was dead. Militants also denied for weeks the death in August of their previous leader, who was killed by a US drone.