QUETTA: At least five passengers belonging to Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province were forcibly offboarded from passenger buses heading to Karachi from Gwadar on Wednesday after gunmen checked their identity cards and killed them near Pakistan’s coastal town of Pasni, a senior government official confirmed.
This is not the first time commuters from Punjab have been targeted in Pakistan’s restive southwestern Balochistan 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 the country’s most prosperous Punjab province of monopolizing profits from Balochistan’s abundant natural resources, saying it has led to their political marginalization and economic exploitation.
Pakistani administrations have denied these allegations, however, citing several development initiatives launched in the province to improve local living conditions.
“Armed men stopped buses at the coastal highway near Kalmat, Pasni, and forcibly removed six passengers after checking their ID cards,” Moheem Khan Gichki, Assistant Commissioner Pasni, told Arab News over the phone.
“Five Punjab-based travelers who were traveling to Karachi from Gwadar were killed in the attack and one sustained injuries,” he continued. “The attackers also set one trawler and one vehicle on fire before escaping from the area.”
The coastal town of Gwadar, located on the shore of the Arabian Sea, is the heart of Pakistan and China’s multibillion-dollar development project called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
No group has claimed responsibility for the latest killings of the Punjab-based commuters, though suspicion is likely to fall on the outlawed Baloch separatist group Baloch Liberation Army, which has previously launched similar attacks on passenger buses on different highways of the volatile province.
In February, seven Punjab-based passengers were killed after the ethnic separatist group stopped Punjab-bound passenger buses in Barkhan district.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed sorrow in a statement issued by his office over the death of the commuters in the attack.
“Subversive elements are enemies of peace and development in Balochistan,” he said. “Cowardly attacks by such elements on innocent people clearly reflect their barbarity.”
Sharif also applauded the actions of the security forces and law enforcement agencies against anti-state groups while ordering an investigation into the incident to identify the perpetrators of the attack and bring them to justice.
