Tag Archives: Town

Gunmen shot dead seven soldiers at a checkpoint in Pakistan’s insurgency-hit southwestern province of Baluchistan, while twelve people were killed and a further 24 wounded in two seperate bomb attacks in northwest Pakistan, officials said. “Armed men surrounded Pashookan post of Pakistan coast guards near the town of Gwadar and gunned down seven soldiers,” local administration chief Sohailur Rehman said on Saturday, adding that three other soldiers were wounded. The assailants, believed to be about a dozen, fled on motorbikes after the shooting, another official Rehmat Dashti told AFP news agency. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Gwadar, a port town southwestern province of Baluchistan. Suicide attack In the Kurram tribal district, at least nine people were killed and 16 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew his explosive-laden car in northwest Pakistan’s tribal region, officials said. The bomber detonated the vehicle just outside the compound of anti-Taliban commander Maulana Nabi, in the town of Spin Tal which lies in the Kurram tribal area, senior administration official Zakir Hussain said on Saturday. “It was a suicide attack, the target was militant commander Nabi’s centre,” Hussain told AFP. Residents said he survived the attack. Nabi’s guards stopped the vehicle and the attacker blew up his car after he failed to enter the compound, he said. Officials said Nabi had developed differences with the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban. Earlier on Saturday, an improvised explosive device ripped through a pick-up truck in another northwestern Pakistani town, killing three people inside the vehicle, officials said. The bomb “was detonated using a remote controlled device” near the town of Dhog Darra in Upper Dir district, regional police chief Ehsanullah Khan said. He added that eight were wounded in the attack. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack, but an intelligence official in Upper Dir told AFP the attackers were followers of Maulana Fazlullah, a radical cleric from the Swat valley, who fled into Afghanistan following a military offensive. Ongoing fighting Much of Pakistan, a key US ally in the war on al-Qaeda and the 10-year fight against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, suffers from near daily violence. Baluchistan suffers from sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims and a separatist insurgency which also targets government officials and security agencies. The impoverished province is one of the most deprived areas of Pakistan where Baluch rebels rose up in 2004, demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the oil, gas and mineral resources in the region. Last week Pakistan’s top judge accused paramilitary forces of involvement in a third of all disappearances in Baluchistan, where the military has been accused of rights violations in its bid to put down the insurgency. 455 … Read More