Taliban attacks on Pakistan security checkpoints kills two
Miranshah (Pakistan) (AFP) - Taliban militants launched two separate attacks on security checkpoints in northwest Pakistan Wednesday, killing at least two security personnel and wounding seven others, officials said.
In the first attack, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-filled car into a security checkpoint as militants armed with guns stormed a nearby building in Shawa area of North Waziristan tribal district, killing two personnel, officials said.
The post is run jointly by the paramilitary Frontier Corps and tribal police and the adjacent building houses more than 40 security forces.
"At least two security personnel have embraced martyrdom and seven wounded in the car suicide attack," a security official in Peshawar, the main city of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told AFP.
"Firing inside the building has been stopped but building was damaged due to intensity of the blast."
A local security official in Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan tribal district and a hub of Taliban and Al-Qaeda linked militants, told AFP that the injured have been flown to nearby military hospitals.
Abu Baseer, a purported spokesman of little-known Taliban faction Ansarul Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack.
He told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location that the attack was in revenge for the death of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone strike in early November.
In a second attack in Swabi district, some 50 kilometres northwest of Islamabad, around a dozen militants launched an attack at a police checkpoint before dawn on Wednesday, police said.
"The attack was successfully thwarted and four militants were killed in the retaliatory fire by police," Sajjad Khan, district police chief told AFP.
The umbrella Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan faction and Al-Qaeda-linked militants has led a bloody campaign against the Pakistani state in recent years, carrying out hundreds of attacks on security forces and government targets, concentrated largely in the northwest.
