Senior Superintendent of Police (Operations), Tahir Ayub, told a press conference that the police had been tipped off that terrorists were planning to strike somewhere in Peshawar. “Acting on the tip-off, we alerted the police. When the cops on the Ring Road signalled a motorcyclist near Achini, he ran away after abandoning his motorbike on the road,” the official said.

The 28-year-old Said Mohammad had sustained critical injuries in the suicide attack on Haji Akhunzada, a leader of the Khyber Agency-based militant group Ansarul Islam, on Monday. Said Mohammad was being treated at the ICU in Lady Reading Hospital where he expired in the wee hours of Tuesday.

Lashkar-e-Islam commander Khan Muhammad told reporters in Peshawar over phone that his group had sent a suicide bomber to target Ansar-ul-Islam leader Haji Akhunzada at his home in Pakha Ghulam area on Monday.

Akhunzada and his son-in-law were among the four persons killed in the attack. Eight others were injured, police said.

The attack damaged a house that commander Haji Akhunzada was building in Pakha Ghulam on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan’s main northwestern city that borders Taliban and Al-Qaeda strongholds near the Afghan border.

Shah made the statement during the opening session of a two-day seminar on the ‘Formulation of a Youth Policy’ at Peshawar’s Archives Hall.

The jubilant President of Awami National Party Asfandyar Wali Khan announced this at a public meeting held in connection with the 24th death anniversary of Baacha Khan and 6th death anniversary of Rehbr e Tehrik Khan Abdul Wali Khan held here at Tehmas Khan Stadium.

Six of those killed included a couple and their four children while one woman died in the second house. The apparent reason for the collapse of the houses seemed to be an explosion caused by gas leakage. However, some police officials and locals said the buildings were in a dilapidated condition.

Six schoolchildren who had mysteriously disappeared from a private school in Rawalpindi on Thursday were recovered from a hotel at Hashtnagri area here on Monday, police said.

Peshawar Senior Superintendent of Police Tahir Ayub, while talking to Dawn said that police had got some tips about presence of the students in a hotel in the main city areas, who were recovered and handed over to the Rawalpindi police.

He said that the reports about kidnapping of the children were wrong as they had come to Peshawar at their free will. “They said that some teachers repeatedly subjected them to corporal punishment which forced them to flee the school,” Mr Ayub quoted the students as saying.

The students informed police that they had apprised their parents about the harsh treatment of their teachers but they paid no attention towards them.

The SSP, however, avoided giving name of the hotel and denied the reports that someone had demanded ransom for their release. He said all such reports were incorrect.

Another official pleading anonymity said that the students Iqra Nasim, Wajiha, Areeba, Waleed, Abu Bakar and Hamza, probably studying in class-9 at a private school at Wilayat Colony in Rawalpindi had gone missing on Jan 19. He said that Rawalpindi police were searching them in Murree but they had fled to Peshawar.

The students, he said had been traced through their cellular phones who were all right and handed over to the police.

In a terse formal report, the Pakistani military maintained its previously stated position that coalition forces conducting a ground raid in Afghanistan carried sole blame for a clash that it said was “deliberate at some level.”