Baloch Freedom fighters strike again

Militants hit phone and rail lines in Balochistan

QUETTA: Pakistan was rocked by six bomb and landmine blasts targeting key transport, communications and power facilities on Thursday, causing widespread damage and blowing off a soldier’s foot.

Five of the explosions were in Balochistan. Two railway lines were ripped up in the attacks, including the main line between Quetta and Zahidan in Iran.

The track was blown up at Mustung, some 56 kilometres southeast of Quetta, a railway official told AFP. Officials were inspecting the damage, he added. Hours earlier a powerful bomb ripped through the wall of a police station in the same town without causing any injuries, local police chief Salim Lehri said.

In the other rail blast a passenger train escaped a possible accident when a pilot engine found part of the track missing at Dera Ghazi Khan, 90 kilometres west of Multan in Punjab. A four-feet stretch had been blown up by a bomb leaving a two-feet deep crater and halting the Chiltan express travelling from Quetta to Rawalpindi, railway police said.

Authorities started running the pilot engines to check rail routes last month. All night services in the province were halted in January.

In Kohlu, some 340 km southeast of Quetta, militants blew up two microwave telephone masts, officials said.

As security personnel escorted telephone officials to repair the damage they were hit by a landmine blast, leaving a low-ranking soldier seriously injured, an official of the paramilitary Frontier Corps official in Quetta confirmed. Security sources said the injured man lost his foot in the blast.

Meanwhile, multiple blasts destroyed an electricity transmission line tower in Naushki area, some 120 km from Quetta, Gibreel Khan, a spokesman for Quetta Electric Supply Company told AFP. He said that the repair work on the transmission line

between Naushki and Chaghi would be started soon.