Pakistan air and ground forces killed at least 77 militants near the border with Afghanistan, military officials said Friday, days after the Taliban launched a deadly assault on a local school that killed over 100 children.
Pakistan's army said 27 suspected militants were killed in Thursday air strikes and ground assaults in the Khyber tribal region in the northwest, the Associated Press reported. A Friday ambush in the region's Tirah valley killed 32 more suspected militants, officials said.
Another 18 militants were killed Friday morning in a "cordon and search operation," officials told the AP.
The military has long attempted to expel Taliban fighters from the northwestern Khyber region, which borders Peshawar, the city where on Tuesday the group's militants killed 148 people, mostly students, after they open fired inside a school attended by the children of many army officials.
Another Taliban stronghold is said to be in North Waziristan, also in the northwest, where the military carried out an operation against the militants in June. It was that operation the extremist group said Tuesday's massacre was in retaliation for.
Peshawar has often been the site of previous terrorist attacks but the suspects were able to evade police by fleeing to the tribal regions, the AP reported.
Also on Thursday, Pakistan's army chief approved death sentences for six "hard core terrorists" who were convicted in military courts, the AP reported. The nature of their alleged crimes was not immediately clear.
The nature of the executions is also unclear, but they are usually carried out at prisons and are supervised by army officers. As of Friday morning it's not clear if the sentences were carried out.
