MUZAFFARABAD: Three Taliban militants blew themselves up on Saturday as police chased them in Azad Kashmir, police said.
The Saturday incident will revive concern that the militants are trying to expand their campaign of violence to distract the military as it makes progress in an offensive in South Waziristan on the Afghan border.
Police said they launched a hunt in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, after residents reported that three men had dumped a bag of weapons on a road in the centre of the town.
“They ran towards the mountains when our men chased them and blew themselves as we got close,” Tariq Qayyum, a senior police official, told Reuters.
“Their bodies have blown apart. We have found two heads and a torso.”
Two soldiers were killed in the first suicide attack in Muzaffarabad in June.
That raised concern that the militants were expanding their attacks into new areas to divert the security forces.
Local administration chief Imtiaz said he believed they were militants who fled the ongoing military offensive against the Taliban in the tribal South Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan.
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