About a dozen gunmen attacked policemen and paramilitary frontier constabulary officers at a highway checkpoint in Zhob district, prompting a two-hour gun battle.

“Four of the security officials, including three policemen and one Frontier Corps officer, were killed in the attack. One of the suspected attackers has also been killed but not yet identified,” Zhob’s commissioner, Saeed Umrani, told AFP.

Three others were wounded, officials said.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) later claimed the attack in a statement, identifying the attacker shot dead by police.

The TTP are separate from Afghanistan’s Taliban but share a similar ideology.

Attacks, mostly targeting security forces, have been on the rise again since the Afghan Taliban seized control in Kabul in 2021 and a shaky months-long ceasefire between the TTP and Islamabad ended in November last year.

The assaults have been regular in regions abutting Afghanistan and Islamabad alleges some are being planned on Afghan soil.

Four policemen in Kuchlak, Balochistan, were killed in April in a gun battle with militants identified by police as being from the Pakistan Taliban.

In January, a suicide bomber linked to the TTP blew himself up in a mosque inside a police compound in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing more than 80 officers.