Overcoming AI challenges for Saudi Vision 2030

QUETTA: A military operation against militants who hijacked a train in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan a day earlier ended on Wednesday, army spokesperson General Ahmad Sharif Chaudhry said, with 21 hostages killed. 

The separatist Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) bombed part of a railway track and stormed the Quetta-Peshawar-bound Jaffar Express on Tuesday afternoon in Mushkaaf, an area in the mountainous Bolan range of Balochistan. The group said on Tuesday night it was holding 214 people as hostages, including military, police and intelligence officials, while a security official said 190 passengers had been rescued by Wednesday afternoon.

Balochistan province has been the site of a low-level separatist insurgency for decades, with separatist groups accusing the government of stripping the province’s natural resources and leaving its people mired in poverty. They say security forces routinely abduct, torture, and execute ethnic Baloch, allegations echoed by human rights campaigners. Government officials and security forces strongly deny violating human rights and say they are uplifting the province through development projects, including multi-billion-dollar schemes funded by China.

“Firstly, our forces’ marksmen sent the suicide bombers to hell and in phases cleared all the bogies there to send all terrorists to hell,” Chaudhry told Dunya News, a private TV channel, adding that 33 militants had been killed in the operation, and no passengers were harmed during the final clearance operation by security forces. 

“However, before this operation commenced, these heathen terrorists had already taken 21 lives,” the military spokesperson said.

He said a rescue operation had been launched immediately after the train was attacked on Tuesday, disclosing that the army, air force, paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) force and Special Services Group (SSG) personnel took part in the mission.

Four paramilitary FC soldiers had been killed in the operation, while no army men had been harmed, Chaudhry added.

Passengers who were held hostage and had fled to surrounding areas during the operation were also being accounted for, the military spokesman said. 

ARMY TAKES CONTROL OF RAILWAY STATION 

Earlier on Wednesday afternoon, an Arab News eyewitness described seeing dozens of empty coffins being brought to the Quetta Railway Station in the provincial capital. He said the station was overrun with army personnel while dozens of family members of hostages had arrived in search of their loved ones. These included the family of Amjad Yasin, the 50-year-old driver of the Jaffar Express, who officials said on Tuesday had been killed in the assault. 

“We have been contacting railway officials since yesterday, but no one is telling the truth,” Amir Yasin, the driver’s younger brother, told Arab News. 

Muhammad Abid, a railway employee who was on the train and arrived at Mach Station, described the attack as the most “horrific day” of his life.

“We were sitting in one of the compartments of Jaffar Express when a powerful explosion targeted the train and intense firing started,” he told Arab News over the phone. 

“We hid in the washrooms with other passengers, but then armed men came in and off boarded us from the train,” he added. “After checking our identity cards, they asked us to run on the track. My life flashed before my eyes when I saw dozens of armed men standing on the railway track.”

Muhammad Ashraf, a 68-year-old passenger traveling to Hafizabad in Punjab to meet his daughter, said that when the train departed from Paneer Railway Station, he heard an explosion about seven to eight kilometers into the journey, followed by intense gunfire, saying many people had been killed and injured.

“Armed men boarded the train and asked everyone to leave the train or prepare to die,” he told Arab News, adding that the militants made the passengers walk on the tracks for three and a half hours on foot.
Ashraf said the militants had detained over 200 passengers, in his rough estimate.

KYIV: Ukraine’s security service on Wednesday accused Russia of blowing up two teenage boys it had recruited to make bombs and plant them near a Ukrainian railway station.
Ukraine and Russia frequently accuse each other of recruiting civilians to carry out sabotage attacks in their local areas, often on railway infrastructure, offering financial incentives and grooming them via social media.
An explosion Tuesday evening in the center of the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk killed a 17-year-old boy on the spot and seriously injured a 15-year-old boy, the SBU security service wrote on Telegram.
In a statement it said “the Russian security service blew up two of their own agents” by remotely triggering an improvised explosive device they were carrying.
Prosecutors said the boys were planning to plant the device near the city’s railway station.
The SBU said Russia had recruited the local teens through Telegram channels, calling them college students “in search of ‘easy money’.”
A Russian handler rented an apartment where the teens learnt bomb-making and fashioned two improvised devices disguised as thermos flasks, packing them with metal nuts to maximize injuries, the SBU said.
As the boys walked together, carrying one of the devices in a package, Russian security services remotely tracking them on GPS “activated the improvised explosive device,” the Ukrainian agency said.
Two bystanders suffered shrapnel wounds while another explosive device left in the rented apartment was also remotely triggered minutes later, prosecutors said, posting a picture of firefighters tackling a blaze.
The Ivano-Frankivsk region, near the border with Poland, has had critical infrastructure damaged by Russian bombing.
“All the circumstances of the crime are currently being established,” prosecutors said.
The SBU said the 15-year-old survivor would be classed as a suspect and risked charges of aiding a “terrorist act” and illegally making explosives, punishable by up to a life sentence.