8 killed in Pakistan clashes:

Eight people including four security personnel have been killed in three separate clashes with militants in southwest Pakistan and Karachi, officials said on Tuesday.

In a major attack on Monday, militants ambushed a Frontier Corps convoy in Panjgoor district of Balochistan province, killing three personnel including a lieutenant colonel and wounding three others.

Nobody has so far claimed the attack in Panjgoor, 520 kms (320 miles) southwest of Quetta, but a security official said it was presumably carried out by Baloch separatists.

In a separate incident, police in the southern city of Karachi killed four suspected Pakistani Taleban militants in a shootout.

“We have killed four militants including a cousin of the chief of Tehreek-i-Taleban Pakistan (TTP) Maulvi Fazlullah in an exchange of fire,” Rao Anwar Ahmed, a senior police official in Karachi, told AFP.

“We had raided a hideout in Malir area but it led to the shootout,” he said.

In another incident in Karachi, suspected militants killed a police official and wounded another when they raided a house to detain a suspect for an assassination attempt on an MP, which took place on Saturday.

Two people — a 10-year-old boy and a security guard — were killed in that attack.

Pakistan has been battling Islamist, ethnic and political insurgencies for decades but violence has been reduced in recent years following military operations across the country. (AFP)