Gunmen kidnap senior army officer, two brothers in Pakistan’s restive northwest — police

In this file photo, taken on July 18, 2023, Pakistani security personnel stand guard at the Hayatabad area of Peshawar. (AFP/File)

• The brothers were visiting their ancestral village in the Dera Ismail Khan district for the funeral of their father
• No group has claimed the kidnapping, but suspicion is likely to fall on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan militants

PESHAWAR: Unidentified gunmen kidnapped a senior army officer and two of his brothers in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, a police official said on Thursday.
One of the three brothers is a lieutenant colonel in army, another is serving as an assistant commissioner at a Cantonment Board and the third is an official of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), according to senior police officer Aziz-ur-Rehman.
The three brothers arrived in their ancestral village of Khadrkhel in Kulachi — a restive town on the periphery of the Dera Ismail Khan district — a day ago for the funeral of their father and were receiving people coming to offer their condolences at a mosque when they were kidnapped.
“At around 6pm yesterday (Wednesday), around 12 to 15 armed suspected militants on motorbikes forced their way inside the mosque and kidnapped the three brothers,” Rehman told Arab News.
There was no clue of where the kidnappers fled, but a vast track of nearby mountains leads to the volatile South Waziristan tribal district, according to the police official. A manhunt is ongoing to locate the kidnappers and rescue the abductees. 
Rehman said the abducted officers had not informed the police prior to their arrival in the restive region.
No group has claimed the kidnapping, but suspicion is likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban, or the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who have intensified their activities in the region in recent months.
This month, two policemen were killed when a convoy of judges came under attack in the region, according to police. In February, 10 policemen were killed and six others injured in an attack on a police station in Dera Ismail Khan.
In April last year, Judge Shakirullah Marwat was abducted by unidentified kidnappers near a village at the junction of Tank and Dera Ismail Khan districts, but was recovered after a few days.
Pakistan has faced deadly attacks by the TTP since an uneasy, months-long truce with the group collapsed in November 2022.
Islamabad blames the latest surge in violence on neighboring Afghanistan, saying Pakistani Taliban militants have taken refuge there and run camps to train insurgents to launch attacks inside Pakistan. Kabul says rising violence in Pakistan is a domestic issue of Islamabad and it does not allow militants to operate on its territory.