Karachi: In a pitched battle that began late on Monday evening and lasted early Tuesday morning, paramilitary Rangers killed five alleged militants including a woman and an infant, officials said.
Four soldiers were injured in the encounter in Urdu Bazar, officials said.
An official handout said the paramilitary Rangers arrested a suspect from Itehad Town, a slum in western part of the city that is considered hotbed of militants.
During the investigations, the alleged militant disclosed information about a hideout where his accomplices were living, in an apartment near Urdu Bazar, a congested and centrally local residential and commercial district.
The Rangers raided the house at about 7.15pm.
Finding no way to escape, the alleged militants attacked the Rangers with automatic weapons and hand grenades.
In the attack, four Rangers got wounded.
A passer-by was also hit by a grenade splinter.
Reinforcements were called in during an encounter that lasted for seven hours until around 3am.
The militants, including the woman, fortified themselves in a room as they continued to defy arrest and carried out at least three blasts intermittently.
However, the Rangers shot dead one of them during the exchange of fire. Three militants blew themselves up in the blasts.
As a result of the blasts, the infant was also killed.
One militant was identified as Mohammad Zahid, whereas rest of them could not be identified as their bodies were mutilated, the Rangers said.
The Rangers did not name any group, the militants were affiliated with but Raja Umar Khatab, a senior officer of counter terrorism department (CTD) said that the militants could possibly be the members of Jandullah, a banned terrorist outfit or with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
The militants were living in this neighbourhood as a family and so it was difficult for the police to trace them. The ammunition and weapons recovered from the apartment was very dangerous, he said.
Khatab further said that the network of Jandullah was eliminated in Karachi in 2009-10. However, he said that it seemed that the terrorists came from Afghanistan through Wadh town in Baluchistan province and then entered into Karachi.
The Rangers raid came a day after their operational capability was validated by the government only on the weekend after their policing power expired on April 17.
