Security officers examine the site of a bomb explosion at Quetta railway station, Pakistan, Saturday, November 9, 2024. ARSHAD BUTT / AP An explosion killed at least seventeen people on Saturday, November 9, in Quetta train station in Pakistan’s western Baluchistan province, Mohammed Baloch, a local police official, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “This toll can still rise,” warned the province’s inspector general of police, Moazzam Jah Ansari. Doctor Wasim Baig, spokesperson for the Sandeman regional hospital in Quetta, for his part reported that he had “forty-six injured”. Mohammed Baloch said a bomb exploded as passengers waited for a train to travel to the garrison town of Rawalpindi from Quetta, the capital of the restive Balochistan province. Shahid Rind, a government spokesman, said the death toll from the attack was likely to rise as some of the injured passengers were in critical condition. Presence of armed separatist factions Pakistan is facing an increase in attacks in the northwest of the country and a growing separatist insurgency in the south. Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, is the largest but also the poorest province in Pakistan, despite its significant gas and mining resources, over which separatists claim control. Many of the extraction projects are financed and operated by foreign countries, notably neighboring China, which armed separatist factions regularly target, accusing them of hoarding wealth without sharing it with the local population. One of them, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), regularly claims deadly attacks against the police and Pakistanis from other provinces, notably the Punjabis. At the end of August, it claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks by dozens of attackers that left at least thirty-nine dead, one of the worst tolls in this region. Read also | In Pakistan, twenty people were killed in the attack on a coal mine in Baluchistan Read later Le Monde with AP, AFP and Reuters Reuse this content
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