ISLAMABAD: A senior minister in Balochistan’s provincial administration announced on Friday the arrest of two suspects involved in the killing of seven Punjabi hair-salon workers earlier this month in the coastal Gwadar district, emphasizing the authorities would not tolerate armed groups disrupting peace in the area.
The attack on May 9 took place approximately 24 kilometers from central Gwadar city, where gunmen stormed a residential quarter at night, killing the workers from Khanewal district as they slept.
The incident marked the third attack against laborers from Punjab within a month in Pakistan’s restive southwestern province, which shares porous borders with Iran and Afghanistan, and has experienced a low-scale insurgency by Baloch separatist groups against the Pakistani state.
Baloch nationalists have long accused the Pakistani government and Punjab province of monopolizing profits from the province’s abundant natural resources, leading to complaints of political marginalization and economic exploitation.
However, during a news conference in Quetta, Balochistan Home Minister Zia Ullah Langau said it was incorrect to claim these groups were fighting for people’s rights by killing innocent citizens.
“Recently, an incident happened in Gwadar where our seven workers were killed,” he continued. “This was followed by false propaganda that they were intelligence agency employees. We instructed all our agencies, including the CTD [Counter Terrorism Department], that we cannot tolerate our poor citizens being targeted by these terrorists daily. Therefore, we gave strict instructions to arrest these murderers at any cost.”
“I will congratulate all our agencies like the CTD who worked hard to carry out the instructions given by the government,” he added. “Finally, we have captured two of the assailants involved in the killings in Gwadar.”
Langau noted the law enforcement agencies had recovered the weapons used in the killings.
He also mentioned the two suspects admitted during the investigations that their instructions were to kill anyone of Punjabi background.
The Balochistan minister pointed out that those involved in such violent activities only aimed to disrupt peace in the country.
The CTD said in a statement the arrested suspects had been working for the banned Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) for about a year.
