QUETTA: Armed men killed nine bus passengers after kidnapping them in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, officials said on Friday, in the latest attack on commuters hailing from the eastern Punjab province.
The attackers took the passengers with them after intercepting two buses on the N-70 highway in Balochistan’s Zhob district, according to a senior official of the paramilitary Levies force. Their bodies were found in the nearby mountains in the intervening night of Thursday and Friday.
No group has claimed responsibility for the latest attack on the Punjab-bound buses, but suspicion is likely to fall on Baloch separatist groups who have been involved in multiple such attacks targeting ethnic Punjabi commuters in the past.
“Armed men intercepted two Lahore-bound passenger buses at the Balochistan-Punjab national highway near Sara Dhaka area and kidnapped nine ethnic Punjabi travelers after checking their national identity cards (NICs),” Yasin Mandokhail, the Levies station house officer (SHO) in Zhob district, told Arab News.
“The bodies are being shifted to Rakhni Hospital for medico-legal procedure.”
Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, said security forces immediately responded to the attack but the attackers fled under the cover of darkness.
“Security forces are conducting a thorough search operation in the area,” he said in a statement.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but most impoverished province, has been the site of a long-running insurgency that has intensified in recent months, with separatist militants attacking security forces, government officials and installations and people from other provinces, particularly Punjab, who they see as “outsiders.”
The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) is the strongest of a number of insurgent groups long operating in the mineral-rich region bordering Afghanistan and Iran, who accuse the central government of stealing their resources to fund development in Punjab.
The federal government denies the allegations and says it is working for the uplift of local communities in Balochistan, where China has been building a deep-sea port as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Last August, nearly two dozen passengers were killed after BLA militants forcibly removed them from Punjab-bound buses in a string of coordinated attacks in Balochistan. Another seven Punjabi commuters were offboarded from buses and killed in Balochistan’s Barkhan district in February this year.
In March, the BLA separatist hijacked a train with hundreds of passengers aboard near Balochistan’s Bolan Pass, which resulted in the deaths of 23 soldiers, three railway employees and five passengers. At least 33 insurgents were also killed.
On Thursday, Pakistan Railways suspended train service from Balochistan provincial capital of Quetta to the rest of the country for a day after law enforcement agencies shared security concerns.
