PESHAWAR: Six bullet-riddled bodies of unidentified people have been recovered in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Nowshera district on Saturday, police officials said.

Rabnawaz Khan, a senior police officer told local TV channels that the bodies were found by a river in Nizampur on the outskirts of Nowshera. They had been gunned down, he added.

“Apparently, these bodies have reached the area after floating in the river from somewhere else,” said Khan, adding that identity of the dead and the reason behind their likely murder was not yet known.

According to the officer, local administration has shifted the bodies to district headquarter hospital, Nowshera for identification and postmortem.

Eyewitnesses accounts suggest that the dead, who are said to be between 18 to 30 years of age, were gunned down on Saturday morning or the day before at the most.

This is the second such incident in the area in less than a month’s time as police had recovered four bodies stuffed in gunnysacks in Bara Banda area of Risalpur on November 18.

Similar cases had surfaced in Peshawar also before a suo motu notice was taken on the issue by former chief justice Peshawar High Court (PHC), Dost Mohammad Khan. The court notice saw substantial decline of such cases.