A Taliban militant and his wife carried out a suicide bombing on a
police station in Pakistan on Saturday that killed 12 policemen, a
Taliban spokesman said on Sunday.
The pair, armed with assault
rifles and hand grenades, raided the compound and took a dozen
policemen hostage for several hours in a town near the region of South
Waziristan, a major al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary on the Afghan border.
The operation further tarnished
Pakistan's security establishment, which has suffered one setback after
another since the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. special forces on
Pakistani soil on May 2.
The Taliban rarely use women
suicide bombers. The attack on the police station suggests they are
adopting new tactics in a campaign to topple the U.S.-backed government.
The Taliban husband and wife
team shot dead five policemen and later blew themselves up after being
attacked by commandos, killing seven more policemen who died of their
wounds overnight, police said.
Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Pakistani
Taliban spokesman, said the assault was carried out in retaliation for
bin Laden's killing and government attacks against militants.
"The attackers were a husband
and wife. We will keep carrying out attacks with different strategies,"
he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
On Sunday, a bomb planted on a
stationary motorcycle just outside a police station in the eastern city
of Multan wounded four policemen, police said.
The Pakistani Taliban movement,
which is close to al Qaeda, has stepped up violence in Pakistan since
the death of bin Laden, in operations that have embarrassed the
military.
The group said it was behind an
assault on a major navy base in the city of Karachi last month. The
Taliban killed nearly 100 people in a suicide bombing at a paramilitary
compound.
Large groups of Pakistani
Taliban fighters have also staged large-scale shooting attacks on
security forces in other parts of the northwest.
The United States has been
piling pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder on militancy since it
was discovered that bin Laden may have been living in Pakistan for
years.
More Pakistani cooperation is
needed as Washington seeks to wind down the U.S.-led war in neighboring
Afghanistan and defeat al Qaeda and its allies.
But Pakistan's generals are furious because the United States kept them in the dark over the bin Laden raid. Reuters
