Army kills senior LeJ militant in operation

quetta — Pakistan’s military has killed a senior member of militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) along with two suicide bombers in a raid in Balochistan, the army’s media wing said on Thursday.

A military intelligence officer was martyred and four soldiers wounded during the operation targeting Salman Badeni, the Balochistan region chief of LeJ, on the outskirts of provincial capital Quetta.

Badeni had been “involved in killings of over 100 innocent personnel of Hazara Community and police”, the army said in a statement.

The military also released pictures of a blood-spattered militant laying dead on the ground, along with photos of ammunition and what appears to be bomb-making material. LeJ has carried out scores of bloody bomb and gun attacks in Balochistan over the past two decades, most of them aimed at the Hazara community.

Earlier this month members of the Hazara community went on a hunger strike in Quetta to protest a recent spate of killings targeting them and to demand greater protection in the resource-rich province that has been plagued by violence and insurgency.

Over the past couple of years Daesh militants have also targeted the Hazara community in Balochistan.

The Hazaras called off the protest after meeting with Pakistan’s powerful army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who vowed greater protection and promised those targeting Hazaras “shall suffer twice as much”.

Violence in Balochistan is also a worry for China, which has voiced concerns about security in the province that hosts a key route in the $57-billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a transport and energy link planned to run from western China to Pakistan’s southern deep-water port of Gwadar. —