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14 hours ago
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A separatist militant group in Pakistan’s south-western Balochistan province says it has taken 214 hostages including military personnel after hijacking a train, as the country’s security situation continues to decline sharply.
The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) blew up the tracks and fired on the Jaffar Express train as it travelled through a tunnel in a remote and mountainous area, bringing the train to a halt.
The train was travelling from Quetta in Balochistan to Peshawar in neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Tuesday afternoon.
The train, which had about 400 passengers onboard, was trapped in the tunnel and the driver was badly wounded, local authorities, police and railway officials said, without confirming the BLA’s account of hostages.
In a statement, the BLA claimed to have killed 30 military personnel and taken 214 military and police personnel hostage, describing them as “prisoners of war”. It said all civilians onboard, had been given a safe route off the train.
The Balochistan government denied there had been any military officers on the train. However, official sources who did not have permission to speak on the record told the Guardian there were more than 150 security personnel on the train.
By Tuesday night, the train and the hostages remained in the custody of the BLA and the terrorist group said it was engaged in an “intense confrontation” with the Pakistani military and air force. The BLA warned in a statement that “if military intervention continues, all hostages will be executed”.
The group offered a prisoner exchange and said the Pakistani state had 48 hours to release Baloch political prisoners, forcibly disappeared persons and national resistance activists, otherwise all hostages would be “neutralised and the train will be completely destroyed”.
A railway official confirmed there had been no communication made so far with staff onboard the train and that the driver had been severely injured in the attack.
They said more trains had been sent to the site to help rescue people but added that efforts had been hampered by the rough terrain and poor network coverage.
“The scale of the incident and the possibility of terrorist elements are being determined,” said a Balochistan government spokesperson, Shahid Rind. “The Balochistan government has ordered that emergency measures be taken, and all institutions remain active.”
Pakistan’s interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, condemned the incident, saying: “The beasts who fire on innocent passengers do not deserve any concessions.”
Balochistan, a rugged and impoverished province that is the largest in Pakistan, has grappled with violent separatist movements for over half a century. The region, which shares borders with Iran and Afghanistan, has long felt neglected and exploited by successive Pakistani governments and has faced a long-running and brutal counter-insurgency by the armed forces, which has left thousands dead or disappeared.
The militancy movement has been gathering fresh momentum in recent years amid a decline in Pakistan’s security situation since the Taliban returned to power in neighbouring Afghanistan.
The ranks of the BLA have swelled and Baloch militants routinely operate checkpoints and block highways in the province.
The militants have recently been behind several high-profile terrorist attacks. In February, BLA militants killed seven Punjabi travellers on a bus and in November last year the group claimed responsibility for a bombing at Quetta’s main railway station that killed 26 people, including 14 soldiers.
Large numbers of Chinese projects being built in the region have also been targeted, including a suicide bomb attack at Karachi airport last October that killed several Chinese workers.
