Deadly attacks on Pakistan police stations

PAKISTAN: Gunmen stormed three police buildings in Pakistan’s cultural hub of Lahore Thursday while a suicide car bomber hit another police station in the northwest, leaving at least 13 people dead.

The attacks on the police in Lahore and near Peshawar extended the bloodshed from 11 days of carnage blamed on Taliban militants as the Pakistani military readied an offensive in the lawless northwestern tribal belt.

Five people were killed including three police officers in near-simultaneous strikes in the eastern city of Lahore, police said.

“Different group of attackers have attacked and tried to enter two police training centres in Lahore. We now have three near-simultaneous attacks against police facilities,” Lahore police official Kamran Ahmad told AFP.

Another police official, Mohammad Yasin, said that four to five men had tried to storm the office of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

“Initial reports say two of them were shot dead,” he said. “However two or three managed to enter in the building where FIA and other employees were working,” Yasin said, adding it was unclear if they had taken people hostage. In the northwest town of Kohat near Peshawar, district police chief Dilawar Bangash said eight people were killed in what he called a “suicide attack”. “The bomber ploughed his car into the outer wall of the police station” in Kohat, he told AFP, adding that the building was badly damaged. Lahore, AFP