Five Chinese workers killed by suicide bomber's vehicle
Five Chinese workers were killed Tuesday when a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into their convoy in northern Pakistan, the latest in a string of terrorist attacks highlighting the security challenges Pakistan faces in protecting Chinese personnel.
The Chinese laborers were working on the Dasu dam, a hydropower project on the Indus River in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The convoy was moving to Dasu from Islamabad and came under attack around 1 p.m., officials said.
Over the past week, terrorist attacks also struck a Pakistani military air base and a strategic port in the southwest of the country, where China has invested billions in infrastructure projects. The string of attacks has challenged the close economic and strategic ties between the two countries.
China is estimated to have spent some $62 billion on projects in Pakistan, mostly to build a transportation corridor through Baluchistan to a new Chinese-operated deep-water port in the Pakistani town of Gwadar.
It was the second-deadliest attack on Chinese laborers working on the dam project, after a previous suicide attack on a convoy in 2021 killed nine Chinese workers. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack Tuesday. The driver of the vehicle was also killed.
“This latest attack on Chinese nationals in Pakistan heightens growing fears in Beijing about the bleak future of its tens of billions in investments in the country,” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior director of Eurasian security and prosperity at the New Lines Institute in Washington.
“China has had a front-row seat in witnessing Pakistan's social, political, economic and security meltdown,” he said. “What is happening in Pakistan, along with the situation in post-U.S. Afghanistan, represents a serious threat to Chinese interests in the broader South and Central Asian regions.”
The attacks over the past week were part of the surging violence from militant and terrorist groups in Pakistan, which have grown more active and violent since U.S. troops withdrew from neighboring Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban seized power.
Much of the violence has been carried out by the Pakistani Taliban, an ideological ally and twin of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as the Baluchistan Liberation Army, a militant separatist organization that operates primarily in Baluchistan province.