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A Taliban suicide bomber struck a vehicle carrying census workers in eastern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing two data collectors and four soldiers who were escorting them, officials said.
The attack took place on the outskirts of Lahore, said Malik Ahmad Khan, the provincial government spokesman. A local police official, Mohammad Afzal, said that 15 other people were wounded in the blast, which damaged nearby shops.
Some 20 to 30 suspected insurgents injured 12 officers while attacking a police checkpoint in the Thai Deep South with grenade launchers and other weapons on Monday, the police chief in Yala province said.
The attack in Yala’s Krong Pinang district appeared to have been carried out in retaliation for the killings of two suspected rebels by security personnel last week in Narathiwat, another province in the Deep South, officials said.
Philippine troops clashed with communist rebels in an eastern town, leaving 10 guerrillas and two soldiers dead, military officials said Friday, in violence that comes just days before the resumption of peace talks aimed at ending one of Asia’s longest-running rebellions.
Maj. Gen. Rhoderick Parayno, an army division commander, said the military did not recover the rebels’ bodies but witnesses counted 10 killed among 30 guerrillas encountered by troops Thursday in General Nakar town east of the capital Manila. Two soldiers also died and two more were wounded.
Police urged the militants in Nasirpur, northeast of the capital Dhaka, to give themselves up on Wednesday, but instead they detonated the grenade.
“Up to eight militants, including a female, were killed,” Monirul Islam, the chief of police for counter-terrorism and transnational crime, told reporters.
An armed militant group fighting Myanmar’s government on behalf of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority has issued a statement asserting its right to self defence and denying links to any terrorist groups.
The statement, dated March 29 but released on Tuesday through overseas sympathisers, is the first public announcement issued in the name of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which previously called itself the Faith Movement, or Harakah al-Yaqin. Analysts including the Brussels-based International Crisis Group say it has been carrying out armed resistance.