Gunmen abducted 13 labourers on Friday in Tank, releasing nine of them later, police reported on Saturday amid a surge in militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the rest of the country.
Attacks on security targets and the assassination of police and government officials have increased in recent months in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with most assaults claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
In the latest incident, 13 laborers, all from Punjab, were kidnapped in Tank district. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.
"The laborers were hired from a private company and were repairing the poles of a 132KV transmission line in Tatoor village, located in Shaheed Mureed Akbar Police Station," District Police Officer Abdus Salam Khalid said.
The officer said the gunmen drove off with the 13 laborers but then dropped off nine on a roadside, while the whereabouts of the remaining four are still unknown. He did not specify why the nine workers were released. "No call for ransom has been received yet, and the search operation is underway to locate the missing persons."
In April this year, a session judge of the South Waziristan court, Shakir Ullah Marwat, was abducted by unidentified gunmen from the D.I. Khan-Tank road. He was recovered days later with the intervention of a local jirga and said he had been abducted by the TTP.
In the past, ethnically motivated attacks against Punjabis have mostly taken place in Balochistan. Last month, unidentified gunmen stormed into a house near Gwadar city in Balochistan and killed seven workers in an apparent ethnic attack. All the laborers were from Punjab.
A month earlier, the Balochistan Liberation Army separatist group had claimed responsibility for killing several Punjabi workers who were abducted from a bus on a highway in Balochistan.