Pakistanis hold funeral for three slain policemen, child in Karachi

Pakistanis have held a funeral for three slain policemen and a child, who were shot dead a day earlier in an ambush by gunmen in the southern port city of Karachi.

According to local media reports, the ceremony was attended by high-ranking senior civilian and security officials in the most populous city of Pakistan on Saturday.

The dignitaries also offered their condolences to the grieving families.

Three policemen and a 12-year-old passerby boy were killed by six heavily-armed gunmen riding on motorcycles in Karachi on Friday evening.

The drive-by shooting took place in the Korangi neighborhood of the violence-hit city.

Medical sources earlier said that three bodies were brought to the hospital following the shootout and that a fourth person, who was wounded, died during treatment.

Investigators have collected from the crime scene 45 bullet casings of 9mm pistols.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but outlawed extremist groups have claimed similar attacks on civilians and security personnel in Karachi.

Pakistani militant groups have been blamed for shooting and drive-by attacks on police and paramilitary security forces in recent years.

Several organized criminal groups also operate in Karachi, the capital of the southern province of Sindh.

In recent months, the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, which is wreaking havoc mainly in Iraq and Syria, has been making inroads in Pakistan through alliances with local militant outfits such as notorious terrorist group known as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban.

Karachi has been wracked by political, ethnic and sectarian violence over the past two and a half decades.

In June 2014, a deadly raid on Jinnah International Airport in Karachi ended the government’s faltering peace talks with pro-Taliban militants. Since then, Islamabad has been engaged in a major offensive against militant hideouts.

The latest assault, which came as a grim reminder of the targeted killing of several security personnel in the past few months, raises questions about the success of an ongoing intelligence-based targeted operation in the city.

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