Nine people were killed in six separate shooting incidents in Bannu on Saturday, police said (Dawn).
These were not militant attacks
That needs saying at the outset, because Bannu appears frequently in coverage of militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the two are being reported on the same day.
The incidents police describe are family disputes, blood feuds and criminal matters. They are unconnected to one another and unconnected to the engagements the military reported in the province this week.
What police recorded
– three people shot dead at Kurram Garhi Mamandkhel, including a woman; a case has been registered on a relative’s complaint – a seven-year-old boy and his 15-year-old sister killed at Mirbaz Barakzai, when four men are alleged to have entered a house and opened fire in what police call a blood feud – a man shot from a motorcycle near a school at Walakhel Surani, which police link to a murder dispute – a 22-year-old woman shot inside a house at Kot Barada – one man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Miryan jurisdiction – a shopkeeper found dead inside his locked shop at Tanchi Bazaar after several days; police suspect murder
Cases have been registered and investigations are under way across the different jurisdictions.
On sourcing
This account rests on a single outlet reporting district police statements, and this newspaper could not corroborate it against a second source. Six unrelated local shootings are not the kind of event national outlets routinely cover separately, which is the likely reason — but the limitation is stated rather than left implicit.
On naming
This newspaper is not naming the accused or the victims. Nobody has been convicted, the accused are private individuals, and several of the cases involve children.
The number that should not be lost
Two of the nine were children, killed in a dispute they had no part in. Blood feuds in the region are frequently settled across generations and against family members rather than principals, which is why children appear in these tolls at all.
Nine deaths in a single district in a single day, in six unrelated incidents, is a policing and weapons-availability question rather than a security-operations one — and it is the harder of the two problems to report, because it produces no statement from anybody.
