Daesh claims responsibility for attack on miners in Pakistan

Reuters | Quetta

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Daesh claimed responsibility for an attack on Sunday that killed 11 miners from Pakistan’s minority Hazaras in Baluchistan province.

“The throats of all coal miners have been slit after their hands were tied behind their backs and (they were) blind folded,” a security official said, requesting anonymity as he is not allowed to speak to media.

A video clip making the rounds on WhatsApp groups, apparently shot by a first responder, showed three bodies lying outside the room and the rest inside in pools of blood.

“The condemnable killing of 11 innocent coal miners in Mach Baluchistan is yet another cowardly inhuman act of terrorism,” Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said in a tweet.

“Have asked Frontier Constabulary to use all resources to apprehend these killers and bring them to justice,” he said.

Daesh later claimed responsibility for the attack, through its Amaq news agency via its Telegram communications channel.

The attack came after a relative lull in nearly a year of violence against the mainly Hazara minority in the province.

In April, a market suicide bombing killed 18 people, half of whom were Hazaras.

Following Sunday’s attack, members of the Hazara minority in Quetta blocked the western bypass and set fire to tyres to protest against the killings.

Balochistan is the focus of the $60-billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a transport and energy link planned between western China and Pakistan’s southern deepwater port of Gwadar.