QUETTA: One person was killed while four others were injured in an improvised explosive device (IED) blast in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province on Sunday night, a police official confirmed.
Police said the blast took place at Brewery Road near the western bypass in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s restive Balochistan. The official confirmed that a vehicle with two people in it exploded due to the blast, injuring passersby on the busy road.
“Unidentified individuals attached a magnetic IED to a private vehicle which exploded in Quetta city,” Mehmood Kharoti, the station house officer at Brewery Road, told Arab News.
“One civilian named Hussain Ali, a resident of Kalat city, was killed in the attack and four people including three passersby were injured,” he added.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on ethnic Baloch separatist groups involved in targeting law enforcers and state-backed tribal leaders in the province.
Kharoti said police were investigating the possible motives behind the attack.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but most impoverished province, has been the site of a long-running insurgency that has intensified in recent months, with separatist militants attacking security forces, government officials and installations and people from other provinces who they see as “outsiders.”
The Pakistani government says it has launched several development schemes relating to infrastructure, health and education for some 15 million people of Balochistan, which is also home to a deep seaport being built by China, gold, copper and coal mines, and has a long coast on the Arabian Sea.
The most prominent of these separatist militant groups in the province is the Baloch Liberation Army, which has carried out several attacks against law enforcers and political leaders considered close to the military leadership.
Balochistan has seen a spike in militant violence in recent days. An IED blast killed two tribal leaders and injured seven others on Saturday in a remote mountainous town in Quetta district.
In March, BLA fighters stormed a passenger train in Balochistan and held hostage hundreds of passengers before the military launched an operation to rescue them.
Pakistan’s government accuses India of arming and funding separatist militant groups against the state, an allegation that New Delhi has repeatedly denied. The BLA and other similar groups accuse Islamabad of denying the local Baloch population a share in the province’s natural resources. Pakistan’s government and military deny the allegations.
