Three people were killed and at least five others were injured in a gunfight in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar late Friday, police said.

The clashes erupted when unknown gunmen fired at a police van patrolling the suburbs of Peshawar.

Pakistan's army on Thursday announced the death penalty for six militants linked to an assault on a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar that killed 151 people, mainly students, in the country's deadliest terror attack.

The men were convicted by military courts established in the wake of the December 16 siege last year, while a seventh man was handed a life sentence.

Pakistani security forces said Wednesday they had foiled a plot to bomb Independence Day celebrations in Karachi after arresting a Taliban gang in the city.

Militants had been planning to detonate a van loaded with explosives in the country's largest city during Friday's celebrations marking independence from Britain in 1947, a statement from the military said.

A Pakistani accused of organizing a 2009 bomb attack on a Peshawar market that killed more than 130 people, has been detained in Italy, police said Friday.

Siyar Khan, 36, who is also suspected of involvement in a potential plot against Pope Francis, was arrested on terrorism charges as he stepped off a flight from Islamabad to Rome on Thursday evening.

Pakistani air strikes on Friday killed at least 17 militants in the country's restive tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, security officials said, part of a major operation against the Taliban.

The strikes came two days after the massacre of 45 minority Shiite Ismaili Muslims in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi claimed by the Islamic State group (IS) and the Taliban's Jundullah faction which has previously reportedly allied itself to IS.

A roadside bomb targeting security forces killed at least one person in Pakistan Tuesday, officials said, the first deadly attack in the restive northwestern city of Peshawar in two months.

A passer-by was wounded in the blast in Peshawar's upmarket Hayatabad neighborhood, which lies close to Khyber tribal district, where the army is battling Taliban-linked militants.

Italian police said Friday they had dismantled an Islamist network they have linked to Osama bin Laden, one of Pakistan's deadliest attacks and, more loosely, a possible plot to bomb the Vatican.

A total of 18 people were ordered arrested following a six-year investigation that began with a probe into an illegal immigration racket allegedly run from the island of Sardinia. Only nine of the suspects had been detained by Friday afternoon.

Pakistani Christians held funerals amidst tight security Tuesday for the victims of twin Taliban suicide attacks that targeted churches two days earlier in the worst attack on the minority group in over a year.

Seventeen people died as a result of the suicide bombings in the Youhanabad district of Lahore, with more than 70 wounded. 

Some 5,000 Christians rallied in the Pakistani city of Lahore Monday, blocking roads and shouting anti-government slogans in a second day of protests against twin Taliban suicide bombings of churches that killed 14 people.

Sunday's attacks in the Youhanabad neighbourhood of the eastern city sparked mob violence in which two other suspected militants were killed, with Christians smashing up cars and a bus station in a rare show of anger from the persecuted minority group.

Police in Pakistan have arrested a schoolgirl for trying to extort money from wealthy men by pretending she was linked to Taliban militants, officers said on Tuesday.

The 18-year-old girl, identified only as Lubna, was arrested at the weekend in the troubled northwestern city of Peshawar after a trader complained to police.