Suspected militants attacked a house and a store selling Pakistani national flags with hand grenades in the volatile southwestern province of Baluchistan on Tuesday, resulting in three deaths and six injuries just before Pakistan’s 77th Independence Day.
The separatist Baluch Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the attacks in Quetta, the provincial capital, occurring just days after the group had urged shop owners to refrain from selling Pakistani flags. They also warned against celebrating the upcoming Independence Day on August 14, which commemorates Pakistan’s 1947 liberation from British colonial rule.
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Wasim Baig, a spokesman for a government hospital, reported that the facility had received three bodies and six injured individuals following the attacks.
In a televised address at a military academy in the northeast of the country on the eve of Independence Day, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, pledged to combat militancy. He also called for cooperation from neighboring Afghanistan to tackle the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group based in Afghanistan that has increased its attacks across the border in the northwest.
The group also operates in southwestern Baluchistan, where it is involved in the ongoing insurgency in the region, which borders Afghanistan.
In recent violence in the northwest, militants attacked security forces in South Waziristan, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, killing four personnel. According to the military, troops responded with gunfire, resulting in the deaths of six insurgents.
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