Twin blasts kill six in Pakistan train attack

QUETTA:

Two explosions targeting military personnel on a passenger train killed at least six people and wounded 19 others in Pakistan’s troubled southwestern Balochistan province yesterday, officials said. The attack, claimed by the separatist Baloch Liberation Army, came as the Rawalpindi-bound Jaffer Express was passing the town of Much, 55 kilometers east of Balochistan’s provincial capital Quetta.

“The explosions damaged two passenger carriages and killed six people besides wounding 19 others,” senior local Pakistan Railways official Imtiaz Ahmad told AFP, updating the earlier toll of three deaths. He said the fresh toll came after railway officials finalized the list of dead and injured. It was also confirmed by a senior doctor at the local hospital Noor Baluch.

Earlier, provincial home secretary Akbar Harifal told AFP rescue teams had been rushed to the accident site. Oil and gas rich Balochistan borders Iran and Afghanistan, and has been roiled for years by violent separatist, sectarian and Islamist insurgencies. The Pakistani military is accused of committing widespread abuses in the fight against the insurgents, which it denies.

A spokesman for the Baloch Liberation Army said the attack had targeted “military personnel who travel to Rawalpindi by this train”. Balochistan is also the site of China’s ambitious $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor infrastructure project linking its western province of Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea via Pakistan. Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif “strongly condemned the attack and directed authorities concerned to find the culprits and bring them to task immediately,” an official statement said. —AFP