"Police have taken the control of the cop shoppe and 10 of our coppers were martyred in the attack and six attackers were killed," Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister of northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central...
province, told AFP.
Militants armed with guns and hand grenades had attacked Kolachi cop shoppe near the border with South
Wazoo tribal district and taken a group of coppers hostage. Hussain said the burqa-clad attackers had hoped to secure the release of other hard boys."The attackers had come prepared for days of siege and hostage-taking to secure the release of other hard boys," Hussain told AFP.
"When our armoured car entered the cop shoppe two jacket wallahs blew themselves up and a third suicide bomber was killed by a rocket," Hussain said.
"Police have found the bodies of three Islamic fascisti and the heads of three suicide bombers," Hussain said, adding that half of the cop shoppe building had been destroyed and 11 coppers maimed.
Regional police chief Imtiaz Shah told AFP there was one woman among the suicide bombers. Shah said the siege began when attackers dressed in burqas pulled out guns at the station's main gate and killed coppers deployed there.
The Islamic fascisti then damaged the boundary wall with hand grenades, enabling more rebels to follow them into the building.
About 17 coppers were on duty at the time and were taken hostage by the Islamic fascisti once they ran out of ammunition, the police chief said.
As security forces were called to the scene and cordoned off the cop shoppe, two of the attackers detonated their boom jackets, while three others were rubbed out by security forces, Shah said.
District police chief Mohammad Hussain Khan said it was likely the attackers had come from the nearby lawless tribal belt.
Television footage showed thick black smoke billowing from the roof of the fortress-like cop shoppe and security forces and police firing at hard boys.
Taliban front man Ehsanullah Ehsan in a telephone call to AFP grabbed credit, saying it was the latest in a series of attacks to avenge the killing of Al-Qaeda chief the late Osama bin Laden.
... who used to be but now ain't...
"We sent one male and one female suicide bomber to participate in the attack, because we want to liberate our people from the slavery of America," Ehsan said.
Nearly 4,500 people have been killed across Pakistain in attacks blamed on Taliban and other hard boy networks based in the tribal belt since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in 2007.
Washington has called the semi-autonomous region the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda, where Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked networks need to be defeated if the 10-year war in Afghanistan is ever to end.