ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s top economic body on Thursday approved $2.5 million in compensation for families of Chinese workers who were killed in March when a suicide bomber targeted their vehicle in northwestern Pakistan.
Five Chinese workers and their Pakistani driver were killed on Mar. 26 while they were on their way to the Dasu hydropower project in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Pakistan has vowed to trace the masterminds of the suicide attack and increase security of Chinese personnel, projects and institutions in the South Asian country. The Pakistan army said earlier this month the suicide bomber was an Afghan national, and the attack was planned in Afghanistan. The Taliban rulers in Kabul deny the accusations.
“The ECC considered and approved proposals for Technical Supplementary Grants, including: $2.58 million and Rs. 2.5 million to the Ministry of Water Resources as compensation packages for Chinese and local casualties at Dasu Hydropower Project,” the Finance Division said, referring to the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC).
The package was approved by Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb who chaired the meeting of the ECC.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said earlier this month the South Asian country would introduce new standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the security of Chinese nationals in Pakistan.
The Dasu attack was the third major one in a little over a week on China’s interests in the South Asian nation, where Beijing has pledged over $65 billion in energy, infrastructure and other projects as part of its wider Belt and Road initiative.
The Mar. 26 bombing followed a Mar. 20 attack on a strategic port used by China in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where Beijing has poured billions of dollars into infrastructure projects, and a Mar. 25 assault on a naval air base, also in the southwest. Both attacks were claimed by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), the most prominent of several separatist groups in Balochistan.
Dasu, the site of a major dam, has been attacked in the past, with a bus blast in 2021 killing 13 people, nine Chinese among them, although no group claimed responsibility, like the Mar. 26 bombing.
Pakistan is home to twin insurgencies, one mounted by religiously-motivated militants and the other by ethnic separatists who seek secession, blaming the government’s inequitable division of natural resources in southwestern Balochistan province.
Chinese interests are mostly under attack primarily by ethnic militants seeking to push Beijing out of mineral-rich Balochistan, but that area is far from the site of the Mar. 26 bombing.
