KOHAT Eight people, including a woman and a child, were killed by unknown armed men in the Kohat and Hangu districts in sectarian-related incidents on Tuesday.

Officials and witnesses said a family was coming to Kohat from the Kachai union council in a Suzuki pickup when armed men intercepted it and sprayed it with bullets.

As a result, four people, including a woman, died on the spot.

Two persons, including a child, were seriously injured and shifted to KDA divisional headquarter hospital, Kohat.

The bodies were shifted to the Ustarzai hospital for postmortem and were later handed over to the relatives.

In quick reaction to the killings, in another incident, gunmen opened fire at a Toyota pickup in Raisan bazaar area of Hangu district, killing four people and injuring eight others, district police officer Sajjad Ahmed confirmed. The victims were both Shias and Sunnis.

The eight injured were being treated at Hangu civil hospital.

The local administration closed the Kohat-Hangu road due to security reasons for an indefinite period.

The culprits managed to escape into the nearby Mishti area of Orakzai Agency, which strengthened the suspicion that the attackers belonged to the same tribe which launched the attack on their rival sect in Kachai village five months ago, DSP Lal Fareed said.

The Kachai clash between Sunnis and Shias had claimed 26 lives. All the victims were slaughtered and burnt by extremists from both sides.

Some investigators believed that the Kohat incident was a reaction to a bomb blast in a mosque in Thall tehsil which claimed four lives.

Last month three police officials were killed while on a routine patrol in the same area. They had besieged a criminal gang which escaped after killing the police officials.

The Ustarzai police registered a case against unknown assailants and started investigations.

The tribal administration of lower Orakzai Agency was informed about the incident and asked to launch search for the arrest of the criminals.

Extreme tension gripped Kohat and Hangu districts and bazaars were closed for fear of violence. Similarly, armed people were roaming the Kohat-Hangu road near Kachai.

The district coordination officer, Hangu, had summoned an emergency meeting of the elders from both the sects at his office and requested them to stay calm.

Both, the DPO Hangu and DPO Kohat said that the police had taken control of the whole region to check the spread of violence.