Three Pakistani police killed in raid targeting Taliban

By Jibran Ahmad PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Militants killed three police officers and wounded several more on Wednesday in a botched police operation on a Pakistani Taliban hideout in the northwestern city of Peshawar, police and residents said. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 190 million, is plagued by a Taliban insurgency, sectarian violence and militancy. The police ran into trouble during a pre-dawn raid, when one of the militant suspects inside a home opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, Peshawar police chief Mian Saeed said. Another suspect fired rocket-propelled grenades at the team, according to a second police official in the city's Urmar area. "Overall, three police personnel were martyred and seven officers were wounded, and one sniffer dog also sustained injuries," Saeed said. One of the attackers was killed by police returning fire and the rest escaped, he said. The area is known as a stronghold of a Pakistani Taliban commander known as Aurangzeb, who claimed responsibility for the December 2014 massacre of 151 people, most of them students, at an army-run school in Peshawar. (Editing by Clarence Fernandez)