PESHAWAR: Militants killed three police officers and wounded several more on Wednesday in a botched police operation on a Pakistani Taliban hideout in the northwestern city of Peshawar, police said.

The police ran into trouble during a pre-dawn raid, when one of the militant suspects inside a home opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, Peshawar police chief Mian Saeed said.

Another suspect fired rocket-propelled grenades at the team, according to a second police official in the city’s Urmar area. “Overall, three police personnel were martyred and seven officers were wounded, and one sniffer dog also sustained injuries,” Saeed said. One of the attackers was killed by police returning fire and the rest escaped, he said.