DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan, June 26, (Agencies): A Taleban militant and his wife carried out a suicide bombing on a police station in Pakistan on Saturday that killed 12 policemen, a Taleban spokesman said on Sunday.
The pair, armed with assault rifles and hand grenades, raided the compound and took a dozen policemen hostage for several hours in a town near the region of South Waziristan, a major al Qaeda and Taleban sanctuary on the Afghan border.
The operation further tarnished Pakistan’s security establishment, which has suffered one setback after another since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US special forces on Pakistani soil on May 2.
The Taleban rarely use women suicide bombers. The attack on the police station suggests they are adopting new tactics in a campaign to topple the US-backed government.
The Taleban husband and wife team shot dead five policemen and later blew themselves up after being attacked by commandos, killing seven more policemen who died of their wounds overnight, police said. Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Pakistani Taleban spokesman, said the assault was carried out in retaliation for bin Laden’s killing and government attacks against militants.
“The attackers were a husband and wife. We will keep carrying out attacks with different strategies,” he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The Pakistani Taleban movement, which is close to al-Qaeda, has stepped up violence in Pakistan since the death of bin Laden, in operations that have embarrassed the military.
The group said it was behind an assault on a major navy base in the city of Karachi last month. The Taleban killed nearly 100 people in a suicide bombing at a paramilitary compound.
Large groups of Pakistani Taleban fighters have also staged large-scale shooting attacks on security forces in other parts of the northwest.
The United States has been piling pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder on militancy since it was discovered that bin Laden may have been living in Pakistan for years.
More Pakistani cooperation is needed as Washington seeks to wind down the US-led war in neighbouring Afghanistan and defeat al-Qaeda and its allies.
But Pakistan’s generals are furious because the United States kept them in the dark over the bin Laden raid.
Ehsan claimed it was the first time the militant group had used a female suicide bomber.
However, Pakistani officials said a female suicide bomber wearing a burqa attacked a World Food Program food distribution center in northwestern Pakistan late last year, killing 45 people.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack in Khar, the main city in the Bajur tribal area, but never claimed it was carried out by a female bomber. Still, that was believed to be the group’s first attack by a female suicide bomber.
Male suicide bombers often don the burqa as a disguise. In 2007, officials initially claimed Pakistan’s first female suicide bomber had killed 14 people in the northwest town of Bannu. But the attacker was later identified as a man.
Islamic militants in Iraq have used female suicide bombers several times because women in their all-covering robes are seen as able to pass more easily through security. Male security officers are often hesitant to search women.