By Staff Reporter
QUETTA: Armed men have kidnapped 20 trainee police officers who were travelling home on leave in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, a day after a senior civil servant was seized on a highway in the same part of the country, officials said.
The recruits, all former members of the Levies force who joined the police after the two forces were merged, were abducted on Friday while travelling in a passenger van in the mountainous Mastung district, provincial government and police officials said.
No group has claimed responsibility. Security forces, including the army, the Frontier Corps and Balochistan Police, have launched a search operation in the nearby mountains, but at the latest reports the whereabouts of the men were unknown.
“At least 20 police constables were traveling in a passenger van when a group of armed men intercepted their vehicle in Gorgina, a remote and desolated mountainous area of the district, and kidnapped the returning policemen,” one provincial official said.
Another official told a local newspaper that the trainees, who were studying at the Kalat Police Training Centre, were heading from Kalat to Nushki for their weekly leave when armed men surrounded the vehicle on the shorter Sarband route. The gunmen seized the men within Kalat district and took them to the Gargina-Kardgap area of Mastung before moving them to an undisclosed location, the officials said.
The attackers released the van’s driver and three civilian passengers some distance away, they said. The armed men arrived on motorcycles carrying automatic weapons, according to the official quoted by local media.
The abducted men came from districts in Rakhshan Division: eight from Kharan, five from Nushki, four from Chagai and three from Washuk.
The abduction followed that of Asad Ullah Kakar, the commissioner of Rakhshan Division, on Thursday. Kakar was travelling from Quetta to Kharan in a private car when gunmen blocked the Noshki-Kharan highway in the Barshonki area and intercepted his vehicle. His driver was later released and raised the alarm. Police said the commissioner remained missing, and no group has claimed responsibility for his kidnapping either.
The area has seen similar abductions before. Munir Ahmed Soomro, the deputy commissioner of Kharan, was freed on 3 October after nearly two weeks in captivity, following negotiations between tribal elders and the men who had taken him from the same highway.
Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, has endured a long-running separatist insurgency. Groups such as the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) have claimed attacks on law enforcement in recent years, and say the federal government denies local people a fair share of the province’s mineral and natural resources. Islamabad rejects the charge and alleges the militants are funded by India. New Delhi denies this.
Violence has intensified. Last month, at least 30 people, including 27 police officers, were killed when militants, described by the state as the Indian proxy Fitna al-Hindustan, ambushed police in the Kach Mangi area of Ziarat, setting off hours of gun battles. The attackers also abducted several civilians and police personnel. A joint operation by the army, Frontier Corps and police launched afterwards is continuing.
On 26 September, a private security guard was killed, two people were wounded and 12 workers were abducted when gunmen raided a construction company’s base in Duki district. On 30 July, the bodies of six labourers abducted in Kech district were found on the outskirts of Turbat. Gunmen had shot dead a seventh man, Javed Khan, from Swabi in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, immediately after stopping the labourers’ vehicle.
On the last day of 2025, 18 people, including women, children and labourers, were killed in attacks in Gwadar and Kharan districts.
Militant violence is rising across Pakistan. According to the monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), attacks nearly quadrupled to 2,425 in 2025 from 658 in 2022. Attacks by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) rose more than sevenfold over the same period, to 838 from 118. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has borne the brunt, but Balochistan has also been repeatedly targeted.
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