MILITANTS have attacked a security post in north-west Pakistan and killed 10 officers in a gun battle, police said today.

Other security personnel were wounded in the overnight attack in Dera Ismail Khan, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to local police official Abdul Rauf.

He said the assailants had suffered casualties but had fled along with their dead and injured accomplices when authorities dispatched reinforcements to the security post in the town of Draban.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur issued a statement paying tribute to the security force officers who were killed and offered his condolences to the families of the victims.

No-one claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on the Pakistani Taliban, which often targets security forces across the country, especially in the troubled north-west.

Security forces have recently been conducting intelligence-based operations against the Pakistani Taliban.

The group, known in full as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, has been emboldened since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, but it is a separate organisation.

The attack on the security post came within 24 hours of two operations in which security forces shot and killed 19 insurgents. Nine died in Bajur, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 10 in Mianwali, a city in the eastern province of Punjab.