PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Two suicide bombers and a gunman carried out an attack at the headquarters of Pakistan’s Frontier Constabulary in Peshawar on Monday morning, killing three officers and wounding 11 others during a parade that began just after dawn, the police said. The assailants sought to target 150 members of the force but were halted near the gate and parking area, minimising a higher toll, Nov. 24, 2025.
The attack struck as the Federal Constabulary, which was recently renamed from the Frontier Constabulary, was preparing for its morning parade in the walled complex at the heart of Peshawar, said the city’s police chief, Saeed Ahmad. The attackers were on foot and seemed to be familiar with the base routine, he said.
The first bomber blew himself up outside the main gate, blowing it off its hinges, and officers gunned down a second would-be suicide attacker and a gunman before they could reach the packed parade square, Ahmad said, and other officials.
Eleven officers and civilians injured, all in stable condition after surgery and emergency care, were being treated at the government-run Lady Reading Hospital, according to Asim Khan, a hospital spokesman.
Security forces closed down roads leading to the headquarters, called in army units and sniffer dogs, and took several hours to clear the compound amid fears more militants might be holed up inside it, residents and officials said. Police later announced that the clearance operation was over and ordered DNA tests to be conducted on the bombers’ remains.
For many families living close by, the attack in Peshawar was a throwback to the darkest days of militancy as they listened to prolonged gunfire and several explosions from the densely populated neighborhood near the military cantonment — details earlier reported by Reuters correspondents at the scene.
Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, and the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, both condemned the attack as an act of cowardice and applauded security forces for thwarting what could have been a much larger massacre in statements reported by The Associated Press.
No group had taken responsibility, police said, but investigators were centered on Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which has conducted similar bombing attacks against security installations. The latest attack follows a bombing outside an Islamabad court that killed 12 people less than two weeks ago.
Analysts note that the group has regrouped since the Afghan Taliban captured Kabul last year, opening more space for Pakistani militants across the border and complicating efforts to curb violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a trend extensively documented by a Brookings Institution report on TTP’s resurgence.
The government has long blamed the Afghan Taliban for letting TTP operate from hideouts in Afghanistan, but Kabul adamantly denies the charge. Cross-border clashes this fall and a short-lived Qatari-brokered cease-fire further underscored that militant attacks are now entangled with the neighbors’ strained relations.
Monday’s bombing marks the latest in a grim series of attacks on Peshawar security institutions and schools, from the 2014 Army Public School massacre that killed 150 people, including at least 134 students, to a January 2023 suicide blast at a police compound mosque that left about 100 worshipers dead and hundreds injured, widely covered by international media regarding those reports on the mosque attack.
Frontier Constabulary (FC) men had been the target of the militants again and again during the last one and a half decades. The blast on Sunday was not the biggest to hit Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, of which Peshawar is the capital: commandant Safwat Ghayur was killed in 2010 when a suicide bomber blew himself up in central Peshawar and in 2011 at the Shabqadar training centre, twin blasts left scores of new recruits dead as they prepared to board buses after graduating from courses – an attack claimed by Pakistani Taliban insurgents who named Osama bin Laden’s death as motivation for hitting back, according to Guardian coverage at the time.
Until this year, the force was known as the Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary police unit responsible for guarding the border between tribal areas and settled districts. According to publicly available summaries of its history, it was subsequently reconstituted as the country’s Federal Constabulary with wider responsibilities and a planned shift of its headquarters to Islamabad under new regulations enacted in 2025.
Authorities admit that suicide cells are still able to infiltrate high-security zones in K-P and along the Afghan frontier, despite fresh laws and more raids against the TTP over recent months. To the families of the three officers killed in this latest Peshawar attack, those strategic debates provide scant comfort as they make funeral arrangements under heavy guard.
