Gunmen kill 5 workers at southwest Pakistan dam 

 

ISLAMABAD —

Officials in Pakistan\’s violence-stricken Balochistan province said Tuesday that gunmen attacked workers at the site of a dam, killing five and wounding two others.

The deadly shooting occurred in the Panjgur district of the sparsely populated Pakistani province renowned for its abundant natural resources. Residents reported that the assailants fled the scene on motorcycles immediately after the attack.

A provincial government spokesperson, Shahid Rind, confirmed casualties, saying district authorities launched an investigation into the attack. The two injured men and bodies have been transferred to a local hospital, he said.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the violence in Balochistan, where several separatist groups are active and routinely target Pakistani security forces as well as government installations.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned Tuesday’s attack. “Those who attacked the personnel working on the dam are enemies of the development in Pakistan and Balochistan,” Sharif’s office in Islamabad quoted him as saying.

Earlier this month, heavily armed assailants stormed a coal mine in the impoverished province’s Duki district and killed 21 coal workers.

The Baloch Liberation Army, or BLA, claimed responsibility for the Panjgur shooting, asserting that the slain men were members of pro-government armed militias and informers. The insurgent group, listed as a global terrorist organization by the United States, claims to be fighting for the province’s independence.

The BLA also took credit for a suicide car bombing in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi in early October that officials said resulted in the deaths of two Chinese engineers and several local security personnel.

Separately, gunmen killed a police officer Tuesday in an attack targeting a health office in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where polio vaccination teams had gathered as part of an ongoing national immunization campaign.

The deadly shooting in the Orakzai district prompted authorities to suspend the anti-polio drive in the area. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but provincial authorities suspected Islamist insurgents could be behind it.

Militants active in the area have previously targeted polio teams and their police escorts, suspecting them of spying for the government.

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The attack on polio workers comes as the number of active paralytic poliovirus cases in Pakistan surged drastically to 41 this year, up from only six in 2023.

Meanwhile, Russia’s embassy in Islamabad said on its social media platform X that it was “verifying reports about the alleged abduction of a Russian citizen” in the Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

A report in The Moscow Times has identified the missing man as a tourist cyclist and a resident of the city of St. Petersburg. Pakistani officials have not commented on the reported abduction being claimed by militants loyal to the banned Pakistani Taliban outfit.

Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, both sit on the border with Afghanistan, have experienced almost daily militant attacks. The violence has killed more than 1,000 Pakistani civilians and security forces this year alone, according to the Islamabad-based independent Center for Research and Security Studies.

 

By：VOA