Dozens of police trainees killed in attack in Pakistan
Associated Press
QUETTA, Pakistan — Gunmen stormed a police training center Monday in Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province and detonated explosive vests, killing at least 41 police trainees, authorities said.
Baluchistan’s top health official, Noor Haq Baloch, said at least 106 people were wounded — mostly police trainees and some paramilitary troops.
Geo TV, citing hospital sources, said early today that at least 57 had died and 116 people were injured.
Maj. Gen. Sher Afgan, chief of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, told reporters that the attackers appeared to be in contact with handlers in Afghanistan.
He said the attackers belonged to the banned Lashker-e-Jhangvi group, an Islamist militant group affiliated with al-Qaida.
Mr. Haq said many of the trainees were killed when the gunmen detonated the explosive vests.
Baluchistan Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti said one of the attackers was killed by security forces and two detonated their explosive vests.
He said security forces have completed their operation but were still engaged in the cleanup process.
Mr. Bugti said at the time of attack about 700 trainees were at the base.
He said more than 200 trainees were rescued immediately after the attack.
The facility has come under attack twice in the past, in 2006 and 2008.
Quetta has been simmering with a separatist insurgency by Baluch rebels.
And as U.S. airstrikes carried out this year against the militants have more than doubled in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters maintain a presence in Quetta and many regions of the province, which borders Afghanistan and Iran.
In Monday night’s attack, between four and six gunmen opened fire as they attacked the hostel at the police training center in a suburban area of the provincial capital of Quetta.
Footage shot by local television showed ambulances rushing out of the main entrance of the training center as fire engines sped in to put out fires set off when the gunmen threw incendiary devices.
Pakistan has carried out military operations against militants in tribal areas near Afghanistan and in cities across Pakistan, but extremists are still capable of staging attacks with regularity.