PARACHINAR, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani security forces raided several villages Thursday in a troubled northwestern region, arresting at least 30 suspects accused of deadly attacks on the country’s troops, police said. In the restive southwestern province of Balochistan, separatists attacked a police post, killing two officers.
The arrests were made during a search operation in Kurram, a district in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where at least 130 people have died in recent months there in clashes between rival Shiite and Sunni tribes.
The district has been cut off from the rest of the country since November after authorities blocked roads following clashes between heavily armed Shiite and Sunni tribes. Road closures around Kurram has caused a shortage of food and medicines there.
The operation was launched days after insurgents attacked aid trucks and killed five soldiers and a truck driver, according to Abbas Majid, a senior police official. He said officers also recovered some of the supplies looted by the suspects during recent attacks on aid trucks.
In the attack Thursday night in Balochistan, militants targeted a police post on the outskirts of Quetta, the provincial capital, triggering a shootout in which two officers were killed, local police chief Qasim Rodini said. He said an exchange of fire was still ongoing.
Earlier in the day, the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the killing of seven passengers in an attack on buses in Balochistan on Tuesday.
The group said in a statement that its fighters attacked the buses in the town of Rakhni and claimed those killed were affiliated with the military and intelligence services. Local authorities dismissed the claim, saying the victims were civilians with no ties to security forces.
The Baloch Liberation Army, which operates mostly in Balochistan, has also targeted Chinese nationals working on multi-billion-dollar projects in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Last year, the group killed dozens of people in three separate attacks on vehicles.
Balochistan has been the scene of a long-running insurgency with the separatists seeking independence from the central government in Islamabad. Although Pakistani authorities say they have quelled the insurgency, violence has persisted.
___
Associated Press writers Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Pakistan, and Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
