Two Pakistani policemen protecting teams carrying out the national population census have been killed in separate attacks claimed by local Taliban, police said on Tuesday.
Pakistan launched a digital census of its population in early March, deploying members of the security forces alongside more than 120,000 enumerators to ensure their protection.
In their war against the Pakistani military and state, the Pakistani Taliban’s Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are increasingly targeting the police, blaming all security forces for carrying out extrajudicial killings of their fighters.
On Monday, two census teams were attacked in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (north-west), in two districts near the border with Afghanistan.
“Gunmen attacked the police officers supervising the security of a census team,” said Farooq Khan, a police officer in Tank district.
One policeman was killed and four injured, he said.
Another attack carried out by armed men on motorbikes in Lakki Marwat district also left one dead and three injured among the police accompanying census workers.
“Security measures have been further tightened and the census process has resumed,” Tariq Ullah, an administrative official in this district, told AFP.
Another similar attack last week in the same region also claimed the life of a policeman.
The TTP, a separate group from the Afghan Taliban but driven by the same Islamist ideology, claimed responsibility for the three attacks.
“Our primary target is the police, whether they are escorting politicians, teams (of polio vaccinators, or census teams,” a TTP commander told AFP.
Pakistan has been facing for some months, especially since the Taliban took power in Kabul in August 2021, a deterioration of security, especially in the border regions of Afghanistan.
On January 30, 83 police officers and a civilian were killed in a suicide attack against a mosque located in the police headquarters of Peshawar (north-west).
The census of the Pakistani population comes ahead of legislative elections which must take place by October.
This process is regularly criticized by political parties or ethnic groups who denounce an underestimation of their representation, manipulation of data and various irregularities.