Five police officers and a civilian were killed on January 10 in separate attacks in Pakistan's restive northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province bordering Afghanistan, police officials said.
Two police officers were killed in an attack claimed by the Pakistani Taliban in the province's city of Bannu, local officials told RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal.
The two police officers who were shot dead were part of a joint police and army patrol searching for the perpetrators of an earlier attack in which two members of the security forces who were protecting a polio vaccination team had been wounded by unidentified assailants.
A three-day anti-polio inoculation campaign is under way in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The banned Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) group claimed responsibility for the killing of the two policemen but said the incident was not related to the polio inoculation campaign.
In a separate incident on January 10, about a dozen armed militants attacked a police checkpoint on a northwestern highway, killing three policemen and a civilian before fleeing, officials said.
The attack on the Lachi checkpoint along the Indus Highway in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Kohat area sparked a shoot-out, Jabir Khan, a local police official told the media.
A police search was under way to find the assailants, Khan said. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
An attack on January 9 on a vaccination security detail in Kyber-Pakhtunkhwailled five police officers.
The five were killed when the bus they were traveling in was hit by a roadside bomb. The TTP claimed responsibility for that attack.
Islamist extremists frequently target polio inoculation teams and the security forces assigned to protect them, falsely asserting that immunization campaigns are Western plots to sterilize Muslim children.
Some parents in the northwest refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated against polio.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries in the world where polio has not been completely eradicated.
At least six new polio cases were reported in Pakistan last year despite the 231-million-strong nation's efforts to eradicate the disease, which can cause severe paralysis in children.