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Militants have launched a string of attacks on police in the Pakistani heartland and troubled northwest, killing 31 people after a week of violence in which more than 100 people died.

The attacks on police in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and a car bomb in Kohat in the northwest, come ahead of an expected military offensive against the Taliban in their South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border.

The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by militants to Punjab, Pakistan’s most economically important province and the country’s traditional seat of power.

Later, a car bomb was set off by remote control in a neighbourhood where government workers live, in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing a child and wounding about a dozen people, police said.

The government says most attacks are plotted in South Waziristan and carried out by Taliban, often with the help of allies from militant groups based in Punjab province.

“First the (North West) Frontier province was on the front line, now they are playing their games in Punjab,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Geo television.

Ten gunmen, some of them teenagers, were killed in the attacks on three police centres in Lahore.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan is under US pressure to crack down on Islamist militancy as President Barack Obama considers a boost in troop numbers fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan. One gunman escaped and one was captured, security officials said.

Seven people, including a gunman, were killed at a regional headquarters of the police’s Federal Investigation Agency.

Gunmen also attacked two police training centres, one a training school attacked this year and the other an elite police academy set in fields in the city outskirts.

A suicide car-bomber attacked the same building in March last year killing 21 people. Three of the black-clad attackers blew themselves up. . Three gunmen blew themselves up and two, including one who was about 16, were shot by snipers, police said.

A policeman, a civilian and five gunmen were killed at the academy.

Pakistan’s stock market had slipped as the violence escalated at the start of the week, but the main index has since recouped the losses and rose 0.

The attacks in Lahore spread fear and sirens from police and other emergency vehicles wailed over the city as hundreds of police and soldiers sealed off the three sites.

.4 percent on Thursday despite the latest bloodshed