Pakistan Taliban threatens more attacks against police

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Pakistan's Taliban warned of additional attacks on law enforcement officers on Saturday, a day after a suicide squad raided a police compound in Karachi, killing four people.

The police are routinely utilized on the front lines of Pakistan's fight against the Taliban, and they are frequently a target of militants who accuse them of extrajudicial killings.

"The policemen should stay away from our war with the slave army, otherwise the attacks on the safe havens of the top police officers will continue," Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said Saturday in an English-language statement.

"We want to warn the security agencies once again to stop martyring innocent prisoners in fake encounters otherwise the intensity of future attacks will be more severe," they claimed. 

At least four people were killed when a Pakistan Taliban suicide squad stormed a police compound Friday in the port city of Karachi, with a gun battle raging for hours as security forces went floor-to-floor through an office building in pursuit of the assailants.

Pakistan's rocky northwestern region has long been a hotbed of insurgent activity, with successive administrations struggling to establish a writ. Police are also frequent targets of attacks by militants from Pakistan's Taliban, as well as rebels from various Balochistan separatist groups.

In January of this year, a bomb that targeted a mosque killed at least 100 people with Pakistan's GEO broadcaster reporting that the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber.

In December, at least 4 people were killed and at least 15 others were injured in an explosion in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan Province. In March, a suicide bomber detonated in a mosque in Peshawar killing at least 35 and injuring 50 people. 

Peshawar was also the location of a 2014 massacre by TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan), which stormed a school for army personnel's children and massacred around 150 people, the majority of whom were students.