QUETTA: At least eight people, including two Afghan women, were killed in separate shooting incidents in a southwestern Pakistani district that borders Iran, a police official said this week. 

Both incidents took place on Monday and in Balochistan’s Panjgur district. The first incident took place near the Chedgi border crossing with Iran, located around 80 kilometers from Panjgur city, Deputy Superintendent of Police Javed Ahmed said. Armed men ambushed what he said were a group of “state-backed” locals working near the border. He did not elaborate further about their affiliation nor the nature of their work. 

“After an intense gunbattle between the attackers and the local residents, six people were killed,” Ahmed told Arab News on Monday. “Armed men torched two vehicles before leaving the area.”

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack but ethnic Baloch separatist groups, the most prominent among them the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), often target tribal leaders and local residents that are backed by the state. 

Ahmed said families of the deceased did not bring the bodies to a hospital for autopsy as the terrain there is mountainous and the roads are in a dilapidated condition. Instead, the victims’ relatives buried the bodies in their hometown close to the Iran border. 

The second shooting incident took place in Prom, a border town in the same district located around 110 kilometers from Panjgur city, during the wee hours of Monday. A pickup truck carrying illegal Afghan migrants attempted to escape a border security checkpost, prompting border forces to fire at the vehicle, the police official said. 
 
“Pakistani border forces asked the driver to stop but he sped up the pickup truck,” Ahmed said. “As a result of border security forces’ firing, two Afghan women boarded on the Zamyad pickup truck were killed and three other illegal migrants were injured who were later shifted to the hospital.”
 
Every year, thousands of Afghan migrants travel illegally through the mountainous and deserted routes through Balochistan to Iran and ultimately, Europe. 

Balochistan, which shares porous borders with Afghanistan and Iran, has been the scene of a low-lying insurgency for decades. Militants have frequently targeted government officials, security forces, laborers and Chinese personnel in the area. 

Separatist militant groups such as the BLA accuse the government of exploiting the province’s resources and denying locals a fair share in them. Pakistan’s government rejects the allegations and says it is undertaking several social and economic initiatives in the province to uplift the local population. 

The shootings occur as the security situation in the province sharply deteriorates in recent months. The BLA carried out a series of coordinated attacks in multiple locations across the province on Jan. 30-31, killing at least 36 civilians and 22 law enforcement personnel, the government said. Pakistan’s military said it killed 216 militants in counter-offensive operations. 

On Sunday, unidentified gunmen kidnapped nine laborers from two construction sites in the province.