Militant and wife staged attack on DI Khan police

A Taliban militant and his wife carried out the suicide bombing on the police station in Dera Ismail Khan on Saturday that killed 12 policemen, a Taliban spokesman said on Sunday.
The pair, armed with assault rifles and hand grenades, raided the compound and took a dozen policemen hostage for several hours.
The operation further tarnished the country’s security establishment, which has suffered one setback after another since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces in Abbottabad on May 2. The Taliban rarely use women suicide bombers. The attack on the police station suggests they are adopting new tactics in a campaign to topple the US-backed government. The Taliban husband and wife team shot dead five policemen and later blew themselves up after being attacked by commandos, killing seven more policemen who died of injuries overnight, police said. Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Pakistani Taliban spokesman, said the assault was carried out in retaliation for Osama bin Laden’s killing and government attacks against militants.
“The attackers were a husband and wife. We will keep carrying out attacks with different strategies,” he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location. The Pakistani Taliban movement, which is close to al Qaeda, has stepped up violence in Pakistan since the death of bin Laden, in operations that have embarrassed the military. The group said it was behind an assault on a major navy base in the city of Karachi last month. The Taliban killed nearly 100 people in a suicide bombing at a paramilitary compound. Large groups of Pakistani Taliban fighters have also staged large-scale shooting attacks on security forces in other parts of the northwest.
The United States has been piling pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder on militancy since it was discovered that bin Laden may have been living in Pakistan for years. More Pakistani cooperation is needed as Washington seeks to wind down the U.S.-led war in neighbouring Afghanistan and defeat al Qaeda and its allies. But Pakistan’s generals are furious because the United States kept them in the dark over the bin Laden raid.