QUETTA, Pakistan, April 18, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Gunmen killed at least 14
people after forcing them to disembark from buses in Pakistan’s restive
Balochistan province, officials said Thursday.
The attackers, who numbered around two dozen, were wearing uniforms from
the paramilitary Frontier Corps, provincial home secretary Haider Ali told
AFP.
They “stopped buses on the Makran Coastal Highway and gunned down 14
people”, he said, adding that the four vehicles were travelling to the port
megacity of Karachi from the coastal town of Ormara.
A naval official and a coast guard member were among those killed, Ali
said. All the victims are believed to be Pakistani.
Provincial home minister Mir Zia Langov told AFP a full-scale
investigation had been launched into the attack and to track down the gunmen,
who he said had fled the scene.
“Such incidents are intolerable and we will not spare the terrorists who
carried out this dastardly attack,” he said.
Prime Minster Imran Khan also condemned the killings in a statement from
his office.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which came
less than a week after a suicide blast in provincial capital Quetta killed 20
people.
– Poorest province –
Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, is Pakistan’s largest and
poorest province, as well as the site of Islamist, sectarian and separatist
insurgencies.
The Islamic State group is also active in the province, and claimed last
week’s attack targeting ethnic Shia Hazaras in a fruit market in Quetta.
The Pakistani military has been targeting insurgencies in the province
since 2004, and has been repeatedly accused by international rights groups of
abuses there. It denies the allegations.
Balochistan is also the site of the flagship project of the multi-billion
dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
The massive infrastructure project seeks to connect the western Chinese
province of Xinjiang with the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar in Balochistan.
But it has also drawn its share of attacks, particularly by Baloch
separatists who have long complained that residents of the province do not
receive a fair share of profits from the project.
Violence in Pakistan has dropped significantly since the country’s
deadliest-ever militant attack, an assault on a school in the northwestern
city of Peshawar in 2014 that killed more than 150 people — most of them
children.
fBut militants still retain the ability to carry out attacks, and analysts
have long warned that Pakistan is yet to tackle the root causes of extremism.