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Islamabad (AFP) – A police officer was killed and two others injured in a rare shooting in the Pakistani capital, officials said on Tuesday.
Monday night’s shooting began when two gunmen on motorbikes opened fire at a police checkpoint in Islamabad.
“One police officer died as a martyr while two others were injured,” police said in a statement, adding that the two assailants were killed.
Pakistan’s interior minister has ordered an investigation into the incident, a rare security breach in the heavily guarded capital, home to dozens of embassies.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Pakistan is battling a resurgence of its local Taliban after the group returned to power in Afghanistan last year.
Shahid Zaman, a senior police officer in Islamabad, told AFP the incident was “an act of terrorism”.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is a distinct movement that shares common roots with the Afghan group.
The Pakistani government announced late last year that it had reached a month-long truce with the TTP, facilitated by the Afghan Taliban, but which expired on December 9 after peace talks broke down.
The TTP has been blamed for hundreds of suicide bombings and kidnappings across the country, and for a time dominated large swathes of the country’s rugged tribal belt, enforcing a radical version of Islamic law. .
But after the massacre of nearly 150 children at a school in Peshawar in 2014, the Pakistani army sent large numbers of troops into TTP strongholds and crushed the movement, forcing its fighters to retreat to Afghanistan.
© 2022 AFP
