Militants kill eight soldiers in Pakistan

Militants killed eight members of a government paramilitary force in a midnight attack on a security checkpoint in Khyber Agency while a policeman was killed and two were injured in a bomb blast in Peshawar, security officials said on Friday.

The militants bombarded the checkpoint with rocket-propelled grenades, two senior military officials said, before overrunning and ransacking it. Local residents said the gunfire began around midnight and continued for at least two hours.

The attack, for which no militant group has so far claimed responsibility, comes amid a military offensive to flush out the Taleban from North Waziristan, a remote northwestern region near the border with Afghanistan.

Nato has long urged the military to take action against Taleban safe havens in North Waziristan, where many groups had bases they used to launch attacks in Afghanistan.

North Waziristan was considered the key stronghold of the Taleban after other areas in Pakistan had been mostly cleared of militants.

But residents say most militants moved out before the Pakistani army announced its offensive last month, raising fears that they may now be beefing up their presence in other areas.

“The militants displaced from North Waziristan have returned to the Khyber agency and started attacks on security forces,” said one security official. The Khyber Agency is part of the semiautonomous areas where tribal law holds sway instead of Pakistan’s judicial system, and the government is represented by a political agent.

Eight members of the state-run Frontier Corps men were killed and three others injured in the attack in the region’s Jamrud subdivision. In the other attack, a policeman was killed and two were injured when a bomb hit their vehicle in Wazir Bagh area of Peshawar, the capital city Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. According to officials, the policemen were on their routine patrol in the city when they came under attack by a roadside bomb detonated through a remote-control device.