Three policemen abducted from a checkpost in Hangu are home safe, a day after militants overran their post and killed a colleague. The men were recovered on Monday through talks led by tribal elders, not the pursuit operation the police had launched hours earlier.
The attack came late on Sunday night at the Shah Almas Pir Ziarat police post, on a hill outside Hangu town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Heavily armed attackers struck the post, killed Constable Feroz Ali, and took three colleagues with them as they fled towards Khanano Kot in the Samana range, Hangu District Police Officer Salahuddin Kundi said on Monday.
A heavy contingent of police and security forces reached the scene, exchanged fire, and regained control of the post, then launched a pursuit operation to recover the three men.
But the recovery came through a different route. The three policemen were recovered safely through joint efforts by the district police officer, local tribal elders, and the district administration, Express News reported on Monday. Deputy Commissioner Basir Ali Rehman confirmed the recovery and said all three were safe.
Funeral prayers for Constable Feroz Ali were offered with full state honours at the Police Lines in Hangu. His body was then taken to his native village of Ibrahimzai for burial.
The recovery the force did not make
The sequence matters, because the two halves of the story were handled by different hands. The police retook the post. The elders brought the men home. No official account has said what was offered or agreed in the talks, or whether the pursuit operation made contact with the attackers at all.
The names of the three recovered policemen have not been published, and neither has any detail of the terms of their release. No official has said whether anything was given or promised for the three men, and there has been no report of arrests or of a case registered over the attack.
Hangu is not the first place where elders, not force, ended a police abduction in the province. In Bannu, seven policemen taken from the Rocha checkpost were freed a day later after a jirga intervened, and the district police officer said at the time that no ransom was paid and no conditions were accepted.
A district where police posts keep being hit
In July, an attack on the Khazina Banda checkpost in the same district killed nine police personnel, including Deputy Superintendent of Police Diyar Khan, and injured 28, the provincial police chief said. Fifteen attackers were killed in the retaliatory operation, the Associated Press reported.
In September, an exchange of fire in Hangu killed eight militants and six security personnel, including Captain Abuzar Farooq and Lieutenant Sheraz Babar, the military’s media wing said.
The Express Tribune’s ledger for the province runs through the autumn. On 8 October, Station House Officer Daud Khan and his gunman Farhad were martyred near the Karak-Kohat boundary. On 28 September, three traffic police were killed in Tank. On 18 September, a blast and assault at Kohat Police Lines killed 15 police personnel among 23 people; eight attackers were killed in the clearance operation.
Abduction is becoming a tactic of its own
The Hangu attack also fits a pattern that has built up across the province in a single week. Four officers guarding polio workers were abducted in Tank during the national drive that ended on 8 November. Four people, including a police constable and a Frontier Corps man, were abducted from a vehicle in Lakki Marwat on 5 November, and tribesmen set up blockades to stop them escaping. The Hangu three are the first to come home.
No group has claimed the Hangu attack. The police have not named the attackers, and no claim has been published by any group.
The abductions sit inside the province’s wider security picture. The federal government has unveiled a security plan for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that includes faceless anti-terror courts, and the Peshawar High Court hears challenges to the province’s emergency and governor’s rule today. In North Waziristan, security forces cleared two militant hideouts hidden inside mosques in Mir Ali on 8 November, the same day Hangu was attacked.
What is still unanswered
Three questions now decide what this incident means. First, who attacked the post, and whether the pursuit or any investigation produces arrests. Second, what the elders’ talks involved, and whether tribal mediation recovering the province’s own police counts as success or warning. Third, whether the Shah Almas Pir post stays manned at the same strength after being overrun once.
For now, Hangu has its three men back, a funeral held, and a post retaken. It still has no answer to how the attackers walked into a police post, took three men, and left. More national news from Pakistan is updated through the day.
