More than 30 Pakistani Taliban on Sunday night seized a police station where they were being interrogated in the northwest of the country and took several officers hostage, officials said.
The hostage takers belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), had been arrested on suspicion of terrorism when they seized the weapons of the police officers who were interrogating them on Sunday.
They demand safe passage to Afghanistan, said in a statement Muhammad Ali Saif, spokesman for the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the territory in northwest Pakistan where the TTP is most firmly rooted.
The hostages are still being held after an operation to free them failed, a senior government official said Monday in Bannu on the border with Afghanistan.
“
They want us to provide them with safe passage via a land route or by air.
They want to take all the hostages with them and release them later at the Afghan border or inside Afghanistan
,” the source added on condition of anonymity.
In a statement, the TTP claimed responsibility for the attack and called on authorities to provide its members with safe passage to border areas.
“
Otherwise, full responsibility for the situation will fall to the military
,” he warned in a statement.
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A video posted on social media, which the government official confirmed to be of the hostage taking, shows a group of armed men with long beards and one of them threatening to kill all the hostages.
They claim to hold at least eight people, including police and soldiers.
The TTP, a separate group from the Afghan Taliban but driven by the same ideology, ended a fragile ceasefire with Islamabad on November 28 and promised to carry out attacks throughout Pakistan.
Between its creation in 2007 and 2014, it committed countless attacks that bloodied Pakistan.
Then weakened, it came back in force for more than a year, galvanized by the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021. In 2012 and 2013, dozens of heavily armed Taliban freed more than 600 prisoners, including dangerous fighters, in two sophisticated nighttime attacks on a prison in the city of Bannu.
