Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police have linked drone and anti-drone technology directly into the Peshawar Safe City project’s central command system, a step police officials describe as the first of its kind in Pakistan. The integration puts aerial surveillance and drone-threat detection under the same roof as the city’s camera network, giving the control room a live view of the sky above Peshawar as well as its streets.
Officials announced the move on Wednesday, saying the system will strengthen aerial surveillance and speed up the response to potential security threats. The timing matters: police in the province’s southern districts have faced a growing wave of drone-based attacks, and officers say the old approach — ground cameras alone — left a blind spot overhead.
How the New Aerial Shield Works
At the heart of the system is an anti-drone network that watches the airspace over Peshawar. Each unit covers an area of up to five kilometres, according to officials, and any suspicious drone entering the monitored zone triggers an automatic alert at the central control room. Instead of waiting for someone on the ground to spot a drone, the system flags it the moment it appears on radar.
The alerts feed into the same command centre that runs the Safe City camera network. That centre, built around surveillance, emergency response and traffic management, can now pair an aerial alert with ground cameras, helping officers judge a threat and send the right team to the right place without delay.
The integrated system is designed to run around the clock, watching sensitive installations, traffic corridors and suspected criminal activity from above. For a city where large gatherings, processions and rallies are routine, that overhead view fills a gap that street-level cameras cannot.
From City Cameras to a Province-Wide Net
The Peshawar Safe City project itself has had a long road. Conceived in 2008, it faced repeated delays before being formally launched in May 2025, and it was inaugurated in March 2026 at a reported cost of Rs2.23 billion, with 711 surveillance cameras installed at 133 key and sensitive locations across the provincial capital.
The wider system already includes advanced cameras, facial-recognition technology and links to camera networks at sensitive sites and along the Bus Rapid Transit corridor. Plans also covered smart surveillance vehicles, drones, anti-drone systems and emergency panic buttons — and the new integration is the aerial piece of that plan falling into place.
Officials said drone surveillance will also be linked to Safe City projects in Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu and Lakki Marwat, three southern districts where the drone threat has been most acute. That would let the central control room watch aerial feeds and field operations far beyond Peshawar itself.
Support for Counter-Terrorism Operations
The drone network is also expected to assist the Counter Terrorism Department during operations, giving it aerial intelligence and a real-time view of operational areas. In raids and searches, a live overhead picture can show officers what is happening on the ground before they move in — a capability that matters in the province’s mountainous and hard-to-reach terrain.
The move builds on the province’s earlier step in March 2026, when KP Police established what they described as Pakistan’s first dedicated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) division, with ground control stations across the province and plans for a Drone Innovation Centre at the Elite Police Centre in Nowshera. The Safe City integration takes that unit’s technology and wires it into the city’s daily security machinery.
Police have also been building lower-tech defences alongside the high-tech ones. In recent months, protective nets have gone up over police premises in the province to catch or entangle hostile drones, and anti-drone jamming equipment has been deployed — including, officials say, during Youm-e-Ashura security operations in Peshawar, where a jamming system could neutralise suspicious drones within a radius of a few kilometres.
Why This Matters Beyond Peshawar
KP Police say the initiative could serve as a model for other provinces as drone use expands in public safety and security work. The threat is not theoretical: militant groups have increasingly used commercially available quadcopters for surveillance and to drop explosives, and the province recorded a sharp rise in drone attacks on police and security agencies during 2026.
For residents, the practical promise is simpler — a city that watches its skies as closely as its streets, and a control room that knows about a suspicious drone the moment it appears, not after it has done its damage. Whether the system lives up to that promise will depend on how it performs in the months ahead, but as a first step, Peshawar’s Safe City network has now officially gone aerial.
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