11 killed in suspected separatist raid in Pakistan
QUETTA, Pakistan: Gunmen killed at least 11 people in southwestern Pakistan, officials said on Saturday, with police searching for suspected separatist militants after migrant laborers were singled out for execution.
Police said six gunmen stopped a bus near the city of Naushki in Balochistan province at about 8 p.m. on Friday and checked people’s identification cards, abducting nine workers from the eastern Punjab region.
Their bodies were later found 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the highway, having been “fired upon at point blank range,” senior local police officer Allah Bakhsh told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The same attackers later fired at a car belonging to a provincial legislator, he said. The lawmaker was not in the vehicle, but two people were killed when the car careened into a ditch.
“Police and paramilitary forces started combing the area for the arrest of the attackers,” senior Naushki district administration official Habibullah Musakhail told AFP.
“But the attackers have managed to flee the area this time,” he said, also confirming the death toll.
Bakhsh said the gunmen “clearly used the modus operandi of Baloch separatists” and “an investigation has been launched to confirm who was behind the attacks.”
Ethnic separatists have waged a decades-long insurgency in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but poorest province, despite an abundance of natural resources.
Militants have in the past targeted ethnic Punjabis and Sindhis from elsewhere in Pakistan, as well as foreign energy firms they believe are exploiting the region without sharing its riches.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described Friday night’s attack as an “incident of terrorism” in a statement and said its “facilitators will be punished.”
Last October, gunmen killed six Punjabi laborers who were constructing a house.
Late last month, eight Baloch militants were killed as they attempted to storm the offices of a port considered a cornerstone of China’s investment in the region.
Two Pakistani soldiers were killed repelling the assault, the military’s public relations wing said.
Islamabad’s security forces are the most frequent target of separatists, who claim their communities are subject to a regime of extrajudicial killings and disappearances as reprisals for their resistance.