General
Train Station Suicide Bombing Leaves Dozens Dead or Wounded in Pakistan
A banned ethnic separatist group in the restive province of Baluchistan claimed responsibility for the deadly attack in Quetta, the provincial capital.
At least two dozen people were killed and more than 40 others wounded in a suicide bombing at a train station in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Saturday morning, officials said.
The attack, in Baluchistan Province, is the latest in a series of violent episodes in the region, which borders Iran and Afghanistan and is home to major Chinese-led projects such as a strategic port. The province is also home to insurgent separatist groups, notably the Baluchistan Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for Saturday’s bombing.
Police and railway officials said that the explosion occurred on a train platform around 9 a.m., a time when the station is typically crowded with passengers, many traveling north to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, via the garrison city of Rawalpindi.
Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, said preliminary investigations indicated that it was a suicide bombing. Casualties included passengers, law enforcement personnel and railway workers, he said.
The powerful blast was heard throughout the city, according to residents, and television footage from the station showed significant damage to the platform.
Witnesses described the scene just after the explosion as chaos. “Heart-wrenching cries and screams filled the air, and human remains were scattered across the area,” said Muhammad Kaleem, a local trader who had gone to the station to buy tickets for his family. “I am grateful to God to have escaped unharmed.”
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, denounced the bombing, saying in a statement that terrorists who harmed innocent people would pay a heavy price, and that the nation’s security forces were determined to eliminate “the menace of terrorism.”
The Baluchistan Liberation Army, a banned ethnic separatist group that regularly attacks Pakistani military personnel and Chinese nationals, claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack in a statement, and said that the suicide bomber used for the violence had targeted army personnel who were gathered at the railway station.
The Pakistani military did not immediately release an official statement.
Last month, the banned group claimed responsibility for another deadly bombing, that one aimed at a convoy carrying Chinese nationals outside the busy international airport in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.
In August, a series of attacks by the group on police stations, railway lines and highways in the province led to the deaths of dozens of people.
Terrorist violence and counterterrorism operations surged 90 percent in Pakistan in the third quarter of this year compared with a year earlier, the Center for Research and Security Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank, reported last month. Almost 97 percent of the 722 deaths attributed to the violence in that period were in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the highest rate in a decade.
