Karachi, Jan 31: A total of 57 terrorists were killed after they carried out attacks on security forces, law enforcement agencies and civilians at 12 different locations in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, officials said Saturday.
Ten security personnel were also killed during the operations that were conducted from late Friday night through Saturday afternoon.
These operations come after Pakistani security forces killed 41 terrorists in two different counter-terror measures in Panjgur and Harnai of the province on Thursday and Friday.
Shahid Rind, the spokesperson for the Balochistan government, said that the attacks were carried out at different locations, including at Quetta, Gwadar, Makram, Hub, Chaman, Naseerabad, in the province.
“The attacks targetted police, frontier corps and civilians at different locations between Friday and Saturday night,” Rind said on telephone. The terrorists killed a family of five, including a woman and three children, near Gwadar, Rind said.
He said identification of the dead terrorists is in process and it would be confirmed only later whether they belonged to insurgent groups only or also included the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) outfit.
Security forces are still continuing clean up operations in the affected areas where the militants fled after exchange of heavy gunfire with security forces and law enforcement agencies on Saturday afternoon, he said.
Federal interior minister Mohsin Naqvi said that all the attacks by the terrorists were averted by the forces. He also confirmed that 10 policemen and paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) personnel were killed in these attacks.
He added that terrorists had laid a large number of explosives on a railway track in the Naseerabad district, which were later removed by the bomb disposal squad.
Earlier on Friday, the army and officials said that security forces killed 52 terrorists, mostly belonging to the Taliban, in separate operations across three provinces.
Six terrorists were killed in Punjab province early Friday while on Thursday, 41 were killed in two separate intelligence based operations (IBOs) in Balochistan and five Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) men, including a commander, were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
There has been a surge in violence in Balochistan in recent years. Balochistan had an upward trend, with fatalities increasing from 787 to 956; an additional 169 deaths, which are nearly 22 per cent higher than the previous year’s figures, data from think tank Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) showed in the January first week.
An Islamabad-based think tank Pak Institute for Peace Studies said there had been an escalation — by 34 per cent — in terror attacks and violence in 2025, with as many as 699 terrorist attacks recorded countrywide during the year. (PTI)
