Pakistan: Several killed as blast derails train in Balochistan

Quetta (Pakistan): Even as it battles a severe economic crisis, Pakistan is facing almost daily attacks from freedom fighters in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.

In the latest such attack, at least eight people were injured in an explosion near a railway track in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on Friday.

The incident took place in the Paneer area of the Bolan district, the Dawn newspaper reported citing a senior Railways official.

According to a Pakistan Railways spokesperson in Balochistan, the blast occurred when the Peshawar-bound Jaffer Express was passing through the Paneer area.

The Pakistani newspaper said the train, which was coming from the Mach area, derailed and exploded.

The eight injured persons were shifted to a nearby hospital.

Meanwhile, an emergency has been declared across all hospitals in the district.

Deputy Commissioner Kach Agha Samiullah also confirmed the incident to Dawn saying that it was a remote-control explosion that derailed multiple bogies of the train.

Last month, six security personnel, including a captain, were killed while at least 17 people suffered injuries in different incidents of militant attacks across Balochistan.

This latest report comes amid rising militancy in the country. A total of 419 people were killed in Pakistan in 262 terrorist attacks in 2022, according to an Islamabad-based think-tank Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS).

“Different nationalist insurgent, religiously inspired militant, and violent sectarian groups perpetrated a total of 262 terrorist attacks in Pakistan in the year — including 14 suicide bombings, marking an increase of 27 per cent from the year before,” PIPS said in its annual report titled ‘Pakistan Security Report 2022’.

“These terrorist attacks, in all, claimed 419 lives — an increase of 25 per cent from those killed in such attacks in 2021 — and injured another 734 people,” the report added.

About half of the total fatalities or deaths caused by militant attacks in 2022 in Pakistan were among personnel of the security forces and law enforcement agencies.

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