By Staff Reporter
QUETTA: Five militants were killed in a joint operation by police and paramilitary forces in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan, an official said on Tuesday, days after gunmen abducted dozens of mine workers and police recruits.
The provincial police and the Frontier Corps carried out the raid in the Karakh area of Khuzdar district after receiving reports that militants were present there, according to Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government.
‘The killing of five terrorists during an intelligence-based operation is a testament to the professional capabilities of the security forces,’ Rind said in a statement. He said sustained and coordinated operations were essential until terrorism was eradicated from the region.
Khuzdar was the scene of one of the recent abductions. On Sunday 18 October, a senior police official said armed men had stormed a marble mining site in the mountainous Naal area, about 40km from Khuzdar, arriving on motorcycles and in vehicles, and had taken at least 18 workers, one of whom, Rasool Bukhsh, was wounded by gunfire. Police were searching for the men, the official said. No group has claimed responsibility.
The raid followed another seizure two days earlier. Twenty police recruits from the Kalat training centre were taken from a passenger van on the Quetta-Karachi highway in Mastung district, while the driver and three other passengers were let go. The recruits, drawn from the Rakhshan division, were travelling home for the weekend, a Mastung official said. Police have said the group once served in the Levies Force, which has since been merged into the provincial police.
Government officials have also been targeted. Asad Ullah Kakar, the commissioner of Rakhshan division, was abducted in Kharan district while travelling from Quetta, and his driver was later released. The deputy commissioner of Kharan, Munir Ahmed Soomro, was freed on 3 October after about two weeks in captivity, reportedly following talks between tribal elders and his captors.
The military said last week that an army major and four separatist militants had died in separate operations in the province. Major Wajahat Waheed was killed by a roadside bomb during a clearance operation in the Pasni area of the Gwadar district on 18 October, while four militants were shot dead in a raid on a suspected hideout at Jattakabad, in Kalat district. The military described the four as ‘Indian-sponsored’.
Khuzdar has seen a string of such operations this year. Security forces said they killed 10 militants in the Shor Parod area in August, and in July they said they had destroyed two explosives-laden vehicles and killed four men operating them.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by area and its least developed, borders Iran and Afghanistan. A separatist insurgency there has intensified in recent years, with militants repeatedly attacking foreign nationals, infrastructure projects, security forces, police and non-native Pakistanis.
Islamabad has often accused India of backing militant groups and Afghanistan of allowing its territory to be used for attacks in Pakistan’s western regions.
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