Military says death toll in Pakistan's train hijacking rises to 31

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan officials confirmed Friday that 31 people, including 23 security personnel, lost their lives in Tuesday’s train hijacking by armed militants in the country’s restive Balochistan province.

In a news briefing, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said 18 off-duty military and paramilitary Frontier Corps personnel, three railway staff and five civilian passengers were among those killed in the initial attack.

Five Frontier Corps personnel were also killed in the attack and the ensuing battle with militants.

Separatist militants from Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a designated terror group, took over the Jaffar Express near Sibi hours after it left the provincial capital, Quetta, on Tuesday.

In the clearance operation that lasted more than 30 hours, the Pakistan military said it killed 33 BLA terrorists.

Chaudhry, director general of military public relations, said 354 passengers were freed, 37 of whom were injured.

Officials also revised the tally of passengers on the train downward to 425 from 440.

Speaking alongside Chaudhry, Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti said 425 tickets were sold for the cross-country train. However, passengers could board at any station along the roughly 1,600-kilometer route, which, Bugti said, largely explained the gap between the number of passengers and those rescued.

“Maybe some did not travel; some were boarding later, maybe some of those who ran [from the terrorists] lost their way, and maybe some got caught [by the terrorists],” the chief minister said.

Blaming neighbors

Tuesday’s attack marked a dramatic escalation in the separatist insurgency that has seen a sharp increase in violence in recent months. In 2024, the BLA and other Baloch separatist groups killed nearly 400 people in over 500 attacks.

Pakistani officials blamed archrival India, accusing it of providing support to anti-Pakistan militants in Afghanistan, a charge New Delhi quickly rejected.

“We strongly reject the baseless allegations made by Pakistan,” Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told reporters.

Bugti and Chaudhry reiterated the claim that Tuesday’s attack was orchestrated by militants with bases in Afghanistan, a charge Afghan foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi rejected Thursday.

Intelligence failure?

Pakistani officials acknowledged there was a security threat, but rejected questions that the brazen hijacking in the heavily militarized province was an intelligence failure.

“There was a threat in the general area,” said Chaudhry, adding that it was not specifically about an attack on the train.

“There are thousands of intelligence success stories too behind [such incidents], which you don’t know — incidents that did not happen because our intelligence was successfully able to detect them,” he said.

The military spokesperson said law enforcement agencies have conducted 11,654 intelligence-based operations across the country so far this year. Nearly 60,000 such operations were conducted nationwide last year, he said.

Resource-rich Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest and least-populated province, where members of the ethnic Baloch minority say they face discrimination and exploitation by the government in Islamabad.

In the last 15 months, 1,250 terrorists from various groups have been killed in Pakistan, along with 563 security personnel, Chaudhry said.