QUETTA, Pakistan (news agencies) — Pakistan’s prime minister on Thursday commended the country’s armed forces for successfully rescuing 339 passengers after a deadly train hijacking by insurgents in the southwest. A total of 25 people were killed by the attackers.
The dead included 21 civilian hostages and four troops, one of whom was killed during the military’s rescue operation. Authorities haven’t provided the number of wounded. All of the insurgents were killed, officials said.
“The terrorists who attacked the train even showed no regard for the sanctity of the fasting month of Ramadan,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in his televised remarks in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, where he also met with survivors of the train attack.
His remarks came hours after Pakistan’s foreign ministry said that Afghan soil was used to orchestrate the train attack, though an outlawed separatist group, the Baloch Liberation Army, has claimed responsibility.
The assault began Tuesday and ended Wednesday when troops killed all 33 insurgents in an operation that the military said resulted in no further passenger deaths.
The train was heading from Quetta to the northern city of Peshawar when insurgents blew up the track, forcing nine coaches and the engine of the Jafer Express train to stop partially inside a tunnel.
The BLA regularly targets Pakistani security forces and has attacked trains, but had never been able to hijack one in the past. They have also attacked Chinese workers, thousands of whom are involved in multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects in Balochistan.
Oil- and mineral-rich Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest and least populated province. Members of the ethnic Baloch minority say they face discrimination and exploitation by the central government.
Amid tight security, Sharif and members of his Cabinet were received by senior government officials upon his arrival at an airport in Quetta, his office said. Authorities said that arrangements were made to transport victims’ bodies to their hometowns, while wounded people were receiving medical treatment.
Foreign ministry spokesman Shafqat Ali Khan told reporters in Islamabad that BLA assailants who hijacked the train were in contact with their handlers in Afghanistan.
“Our security forces successfully eliminated all 33 terrorists, including suicide bombers, while rescuing the hostages,” he said.
Khan said that the attackers had been “in direct communications with Afghanistan-based planners throughout the incident” and Pakistan has repeatedly asked Kabul “to deny the use of its soil for terrorist groups like BLA for their attacks against Pakistan.”
“We urge Afghanistan to hold perpetrators, organizers, financiers, of this reprehensible act of terrorism accountable and cooperate with the government of Pakistan to bring all those who are concerned with this attack, including the real sponsors of terrorism, to justice,” Khan said.
In an overnight statement, the military said that it had “confirmed intelligence” indicating that the assault was “orchestrated and directed by terrorist ring leaders operating from Afghanistan, who were in direct communication with the terrorists throughout the incident.” The military didn’t reveal details of the intelligence.
In Kabul, Afghan foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi rejected the Pakistani accusations, saying: “We are saddened by the loss of life of innocents in the incident.”
According to a Pakistani military statement, the “terrorists, after blowing up the railway track, took control of the train and held the passengers hostage including women, children and elderly, using them as human shields.”
Many survivors said the assailants opened fire on the windows of the train, entered the cars and killed or wounded people before taking them hostage.
Three soldiers who had been guarding the railroad track were among those killed, according to military spokesman Lt. Gen. Ahmad Sharif.
Separately, Pakistani security killed 10 militants after spotting them near a military facility in South Waziristan, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan, officials said.
Authorities said those killed were members of Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTT. The group is an ally of the Taliban in Afghanistan and has been emboldened since the Afghan Taliban seized power there in 2021.
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