7 killed after militants intercept passenger buses in restive southwestern Pakistan
QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Militants armed with guns intercepted several passenger buses on a highway in the restive southwestern Pakistan late Tuesday night, forcibly removed seven passengers and killed them before fleeing the scene, officials said.
The attack occurred in Rakhni, a town in Balochistan, as the buses were heading to the eastern Punjab province from the southwestern city of Quetta, said Waqar Alam, a district administrator.
He said the attackers targeted and killed only those people who were from the Punjab province.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack but the suspicion is likely to fall on ethnic Baloch separatists, who have been blamed by the government for previous such attacks on passenger buses in Balochistan.
Last year, the Baloch Liberation Army separatist group killed dozens of people in three separate attacks on vehicles in Balochistan, which has been the scene of a long-running insurgency in Pakistan, with various separatist groups staging attacks, mainly on security forces.
The separatists are demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad.
Although Pakistani authorities say they have quelled the insurgency, violence in Balochistan has persisted.
The latest violence came a day after militants in northwestern Pakistan overnight ambushed security forces who were responding to an attack on aid trucks in the troubled Kurram district, killing four soldiers and wounding some others.
Authorities had dispatched reinforcements to Kurram to respond to Monday’s attack on an aid convoy, where a driver and a security official were killed.
Officials said some security forces were also wounded in the overnight ambush in Kurram, a district in restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where at least 130 people have died in recent months in clashes between rival Shiite and Sunni tribes. Several trucks heading to Parachinar, the district’s main city, were looted and burned, authorities said.
Qaiser Abbas, a doctor at a hospital in Parachinar, said they received the bodies of four soldiers Monday night.
No group has claimed responsibility for the latest attacks, but suspicion is likely to fall on Sunni militants.
Shiite Muslims dominate parts of Kurram but they are a minority in the rest of Sunni-majority Pakistan. The area has a history of sectarian conflict.
The attack on troops in Kurram comes as they conduct operations in former strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban in the North and South Waziristan districts and elsewhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
In a statement Tuesday, the military said troops had killed 30 militants the previous day in an operation in South Waziristan. It gave no further details.
Such operations are conducted against the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP. They are allies of the Afghan Taliban, who came into power in Afghanistan in 2022.
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Associated Press writers Javed Hussain in Parachinar, Pakistan and Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this story.
By ABDUL SATTAR
Associated Press
