QUETTA: Five security personnel, including two officers, and one customs official were martyred overnight on Monday when militants stormed a customs facility in the country’s restive southwestern Balochistan province, part of a wave of violence that left 21 terrorists killed across two districts, the military said on Tuesday.
Politics
After legal win in The Hague, Pakistan tells India at SCO not to weaponise water
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told leaders of a major Asian security bloc on Tuesday that water “must never be weaponised,” using a summit stage to press neighbouring India on a decades-old river-sharing treaty just a day after an international tribunal ruled that India could not unilaterally suspend it.
Security forces kill 12 militants in gun battle after Reko Diq convoy ambush
QUETTA: Security forces killed 12 armed militants on Monday after gunmen ambushed a convoy of vehicles associated with the Reko Diq copper and gold project in a remote stretch of southwestern Pakistan, the latest in a string of assaults on a mining venture that foreign investors have been assured is safe.
PPP leaders draw a line against calls to divide Sindh province
KARACHI: Sindh’s chief minister told the provincial assembly Monday that his province would never be split apart, dismissing calls for new administrative units as the work of outsiders rather than the people who would actually be affected.
PM Sharif meets Iranian Pezeshkian in Kyrgyzstan as Tehran-Washington conflict reignites
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met on Monday with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of a regional summit in Bishkek, pressing the case for diplomatic restraint just hours after the United States and Iran exchanged their first direct strikes in more than a month, reigniting a war that has simmered since February.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey formalise defence pact as ‘Makkah Defence Alliance’
ISLAMABAD: Three nations bound by a first-of-its-kind mutual defense pledge took their first concrete steps on Monday toward building the institutions of what officials are now calling the “Makkah Defence Alliance,” with Pakistan set to supply the bloc’s inaugural secretary general and Saudi Arabia hosting its headquarters.
PM Sharif departs for Kyrgyzstan as regional bloc marks 25th year
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif left for Kyrgyzstan on Monday for a three-day visit that will place him at the same summit table as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the first time since the two nuclear-armed neighbours fought a brief conflict last year, part of a gathering of regional leaders marking a quarter-century of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia open first defence talks under new mutual-security pact
ISLAMABAD: Senior Pakistani officials arrived in Turkey for the first formal meeting of a strategic committee established under a new trilateral defence pact with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which commits each nation to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all three.
Govt disputes reports on Imran Khan’s prison conditions, medical care
ISLAMABAD: The government on Saturday moved to counter what it described as misleading foreign media coverage of the imprisonment of former prime minister Imran Khan, issuing a detailed rebuttal that touched on his living conditions, family access, and a medical dispute now before the country’s Supreme Court.
Azad Kashmir swears in new premier after contested nomination, narrow party revolt
MUZAFFARABAD: Barrister Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani, a 46-year-old lawyer whose political career has been defined as much by sudden reversals as by steady ambition, was sworn in on Friday as prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, capping a 15-year rise that included an unlikely by-election upset, a cabinet post, an electoral defeat, and finally a phone call from the top of his party that few had seen coming.