QUETTA: A bomb explosion on a busy road in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province yesterday killed three people, including a paramilitary soldier, and wounded at least 16 other people, security officials said.
The bomb, planted in a car parked by the side of the road on a crowded crossroads in Quetta city, apparently targeted a paramilitary vehicle passing the area.
“The bomb was detonated by remote control when a vehicle of the Frontier Corps (FC) came close to a busy crossroads,” Quetta police chief Abdul Razzak Cheema said. Cheema said two of the dead and most of the wounded were labourers who were waiting in the area.
A member of a bomb disposal unit said that high quality explosives weighing up to 40 kilograms (up to 90 pounds) had been used to make the bomb.
A Frontier Corps spokesman, Manzoor Ahmed, confirmed that one soldier has died in the attack while another was wounded.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack but Baluch separatists are active in the area and often attack government forces and installations.
Resource-rich Baluchistan is home to a long-running separatist conflict that was revived in 2004, with nationalists seeking to stop what they see as the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and alleged rights abuses.
Terrorism in Pakistan has become a major and highly destructive phenomenon in recent years. The annual death toll from terrorist attacks has risen from 164 in 2003 to 3318 in 2009 with a total of 35,000 Pakistanis killed between September 11, 2001 and May 2011.
According to the government of Pakistan, the direct and indirect economic costs of terrorism from 2000–2010 total $68bn.
President Asif Ali Zardari, along with former President ex-Pakistan Army head Pervez Musharraf, have admitted that terrorist outfits were ‘deliberately created and nurtured’ by past governments ‘as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives’ The trend began with Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s controversial ‘Islamization’ policies of the 1980s, under which conflicts were started against soviet involvement in Afghanistan.
AFP
