PESHAWAR: Pakistani police say a senior police officer has died while defusing a roadside bomb in the country’s northwest.
Senior police officer Fazal Mola Dad says Hakam Khan had played a key role in battling militants in the northwestern city of Peshawar. He had defused dozens of bombs in the past several years.
Dad says Khan rushed to the city’s Matni neighborhood yesterday after being alerted that insurgents had planted two bombs near a road, which is used by security convoys to travel to the Khyber tribal region.
He says Khan successfully defused one bomb but while he was working on the second one, it exploded.
Peshawar is considered the gateway to Pakistan’s tribal regions, and violence from the regions often spills over into the city.
Separately, Monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed 371 people and affected nearly 4.5 million, the government disaster relief agency said yesterday.
Pakistan has suffered devastating floods in the past two years, including the worst in its history in 2010, when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million. As in 2010 and 2011, most of those hit by the latest floods are in Sindh, where the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said 2.8 million were affected, with nearly 890,000 in Punjab and 700,000 in Baluchistan.
Pakistani police officer dies while defusing bomb
