Karachi, Pakistan:
A massive explosion on a road near the airport of Pakistan’s largest city killed two Chinese, Beijing’s embassy said on Monday, after a separatist militant group claimed an attack in the area.
An AFP journalist heard the explosion at around 11pm (6pm GMT) on Sunday in Pakistan’s southern megacity Karachi.
The regional government of the southern province of Sindh said on X that a “tanker” had exploded on the highway to the airport.
The separatist militant group the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) said in a statement that it had “targeted a high-level convoy of Chinese engineers and investors” coming from Karachi airport.
Beijing’s embassy in Pakistan said in a statement on Monday that two Chinese citizens were killed in a “terror attack” on a convoy of personnel from the Chinese-funded Port Qasim energy project.
The attack also injured one Chinese and several Pakistani citizens, the embassy said.
The embassy urged authorities to “conduct a thorough investigation into the attack and severely punish the killers, while taking practical measures to fully guarantee the safety of Chinese citizens, institutions and projects.”
The BLA is a separatist militant group that advocates for the autonomy of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, the country’s largest but poorest region.
The group has regularly targeted Chinese nationals, claiming that ethnic Baloch residents do not receive their fair share of the wealth acquired by foreign investors.
Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority said flights from Karachi continued “as usual” and “agencies are investigating the cause at the scene of the accident/explosion”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)