Pakistani police shot and killed a vendor they suspected of being a suicide bomber in a northwestern city on Thursday, officials said.
The vendor was riding a bicycle and didn’t stop at a checkpoint outside a courthouse in Mardan city, police officer Mumtaz Khan said. The police first rammed a vehicle into the bicycle when the vendor didn’t listen to warning shouts and shot him when he tried to run away, he said.
No arms found
The man died later and no explosives or weapons were found, Mr. Khan said.
“I don’t understand why the vendor would keep going [even though] we were giving him loud warnings,” said another officer, Zeb Bakhtiar, who was at the checkpoint.
Pakistani police have been on high alert after a recent string of suicide bombings that have killed more than 125 people, the latest of them inside a court building in another northwestern city. Pakistani Taliban-linked militants and the Islamic State group have claimed the brazen attacks.
The Pakistani Taliban, their allied local militant groups and al-Qaeda-linked foreign militants have been operating from the country’s lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border. The rough terrain consists of long swathes of land that has historically been ruled by a set of local tribal laws, effectively denying access to the Pakistani police and judicial system there.
Pakistan’s Cabinet on Thursday approved a set of reforms that will bring the tribal regions under government control, an aide to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said. The reforms will be implemented over a period of five years after a merger of the tribal regions with Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, he said.
