On Tuesday, March 11, some daring separatist fighters in southwest Pakistan said they grabbed 182 people, including soldiers, during a big train attack. They warned they’d do something awful to them if the security forces didn’t back off.
The police, local leaders, and train workers said the train, carrying about 400 passengers, got stuck in a tunnel. The poor driver got hurt really bad, too. Security forces heard a loud boom near the tunnel and were battling the fighters in a rocky, mountain area.
The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a group that wants Balochistan—a place next to Afghanistan and Iran—to be its own country, bragged that they took down 20 soldiers and even knocked a drone out of the sky. The grown-ups in charge in Pakistan haven’t said if that’s true yet.
The BLA said they nabbed 182 people from the train, including some army folks and other security workers who were off-duty, heading home. But they let the regular people go free! In a message they sent to news folks and posted online, they said, “Civilian passengers, particularly women, children, the elderly, and Baloch citizens, have been released safely and given a secure route.”
Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, was super mad about the attack. He said the government won’t give in to “beasts that fire on innocent passengers.”
