20 injured in militant raid on Pakistani police academy: officials
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Quetta, Pakistan, Oct 24, 2016 (AFP) -Around half a dozen militants stormed a police academy in southwest Pakistan late Monday, injuring at least 20 people as troops arrived at the scene to carry out an operation and casualties were expected to rise.
The attack occurred at the Balochistan Police College located 20 kilometres to the south of the city at around 11:30 pm (1830 GMT), with gunfire continuing to ring out from the site hours later.
“At least 20 people have been injured in the attack,” a senior provincial official told AFP on condition of anonymity, while Anwar Kakar, the provincial government spokesman placed the figure at 21 — most of them recruits.
It was not immediately clear how many cadets were in the building at the time of the attack. Provincial home minister Mir Sarfaraz Ahmed Bugti said it normally housed around 700 but “recently there was a batch which graduated so I can’t say how many there are now”.
The military earlier said in a statement that soldiers and paramilitary forces had arrived at the site, placing the number of militants at “five or six”.
As the battle to retake the academy continued, police and civil administration officials at the site told AFP they had heard three blasts.
Television footage meanwhile showed speeding ambulances carrying injured police.
No group has yet claimed responsibility but Baloch separatists demanding greater autonomy of the mineral rich but desperately poor region have been waging an on-off insurgency for decades, and the province is also riven by sectarian strife and Islamist violence.
The attack came a day after separatist gunmen for the Baloch Liberation Army on a motorcycle shot dead two coast guards and a civilian and wounded a shopkeeper in a remote southwest coastal town in the same province.
In August, a suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital claimed by the Islamic State group and the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction of the Pakistani Taliban killed 73 people, including many of the city’s lawyer community who had gone there to mourn the fatal shooting of a colleague.
Balochistan is also a key region for China’s ambitious $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) infrastructure project linking its western province of Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea via Pakistan.
Security problems have mired CPEC in the past with numerous separatist attacks, but China has said it is confident the Pakistani military is in control.
The army has repeatedly been accused by international rights groups of abuses in Balochistan.
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