amn / web desk
At least 10 police personnel were killed and six injured in a pre-dawn attack on Monday by militants on a police station in northwest Pakistan. The incident took place as violence escalated ahead of general elections this week.
Militants attacked the police station with sniper fire and then entered the building, said police officers in Pakistan’s Draban region in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, and whether it was related to the election.
A national assembly candidate was shot dead last Wednesday elsewhere in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. On the same day, another political leader was shot dead in his party’s election office in Balochistan province.
Draban lies in an area considered a stronghold of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party. The conservative religious party’s leader, Maulana Fazal Ur Rehman, travelled last month to Afghanistan to meet the Taliban’s supreme spiritual leader, local media reported, one of his few known meetings with foreign dignitaries.