Six security personnel at an oil and gas exploration site in Pakistan owned by a Hungarian company were killed Monday night by dozens of gunmen, local police said.
About 50 fighters attacked a site belonging to the Hungarian energy group MOL in the Hangu district of the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa around midnight Monday night, local police chief Asif Bahadur told AFP. “They were equipped with heavy and light weapons and fired mortar shells, killing six security personnel at the main entrance” to the remote site near the border with Afghanistan, Bahadur said.
The MOL group, from Hungary, said that none of its employees were on site at the time of the attack, whose death toll it confirmed. “Production from the wells has been temporarily shut down remotely and the wells are now secured, pending the completion of a regulatory site investigation,” he said. Four of the dead belonged to the Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary police unit, and two were private security guards, police said.
“The exchange of gunfire lasted for more than an hour. The police forces forced the militants to flee,” Bahadur said. He blamed the assault on the Pakistani Taliban’s Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the most active armed Islamist group in the region. However, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
MOL has been operating in Pakistan since 1999 and employs 400 people in the country, according to its website. “We are assessing the information,” said a spokesman for the Hungarian embassy in Islamabad, noting that no diplomatic action was being considered. According to Bahadur, the attackers came from the neighboring North Waziristan district, historically one of the haunts of Islamist armed groups in the region.
After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its NATO allies, the area has been the site of numerous Pakistani army offensives and U.S. drone attacks to drive out insurgents linked to the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban. Pakistan has been facing a deteriorating security situation for several months, particularly since the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul in August 2021, especially in the border regions with Afghanistan.
Most of the attacks are carried out by the TTP, a group distinct from the Afghan Taliban but driven by the same Islamist ideology. Pakistan blames the Afghan Taliban for allowing the TTP to plan its attacks from Afghan soil, which the TTP has consistently denied.
