Three suicide bombers attacked Pakistani police and paramilitary soldiers in the southwestern city of Quetta yesterday, killing six police and wounding 15 members of the security forces, officials said.
One bomber on a bike detonated his explosives near a police truck, provincial police chief Moazzam Jah Ansari said.
Seven police officers were wounded in that attack.
“It is a suicide attack, and we have a confirmation that six of our police officials are dead,” Ansari told Reuters.
He said the bombing of the police truck was so powerful that the vehicle overturned.
It was not clear whether the bomber was himself wearing an explosive vest or if the motorcycle was filled with explosives.
Half an hour earlier, two suicide bombers tried to attack a paramilitary checkpoint on the city’s outskirts, but troops deployed there engaged them, a paramilitary officer said.
He said that the troops had opened fire at the attackers, who detonated their explosives, wounding eight soldiers.
Both the suicide bombers died, he said on condition of anonymity because the army was due to issue an official statement.
“The first suicide bomber blew himself up outside a paramilitary frontier corps checkpost in the outskirts of Quetta city after he was spotted by the guards,” Ghulam Ali Baloch, home secretary of Baluchistan told AFP. “Just in the next moments, another bomber who was covering the first attacker exchanged fire with the security forces and later blew himself up.”
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Quetta is the capital city of the southwestern province of Baluchistan, which has been plagued by violence.
Militants linked to the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) have been operating in the province, which borders Iran as well as Afghanistan.
It also has an indigenous ethnic Baloch insurgency fighting the central government.
IS has created a branch in Pakistan and Afghanistan, mostly by recruiting among break away factions of other established militant groups.
Its followers have claimed some of Pakistan’s most deadly recent attacks.
Six members of Pakistan’s tiny Christian minority community, four of them from the same family, and two people from the Shia minority were gunned down in Quetta this month.
In December two bombers stormed a church in southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 10 people and wounding up to 56.
Baluchistan is the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces but its roughly 7mn people have long argued that they do not get a fair share of its vast gas and mineral wealth.
Security officials cordon off the site of one of the bombing attacks in Quetta yesterday.
