A suicide bomber attacked outside a stadium in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s province of Balochistan, on Tuesday night. The nearby stadium had been rented out by a nationalist group called the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M) to hold a memorial rally for its founder, who was killed in 2021.
Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest but most thinly populated and impoverished province, a restless region with a separatist movement that occasionally attacks Pakistani security forces and government employees. Most of the separatist violence, including a suicide bomb attack on a school bus in May that killed four children, have been attributed to an outlaw group called the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).
The BNP-M is a more moderate Baloch nationalist group that wants greater autonomy for Balochistan, and is often strongly critical of the Pakistani central government. It was founded by Sardar Ataullah Mengal, a politician and tribal leader whose long career as a Baloch nationalist icon concluded with his death at the age of 92 in 2021.
Ataullah’s son, Sardar Akhtar Mengal, is the current leader of the party, and was present at the rally on the night of the bombing. He was reportedly not injured in the blast. (“Sardar” is a title that signifies the leader of a tribe, and Mengal is both their family and tribal name.)
Local police officials said the suicide bomb was detonated in a parking lot close to the stadium where the memorial rally was held. The rally reportedly had hundreds of attendees. Thirteen people were killed, along with the suicide bomber, whose remains were recovered by police. At least 30 injuries were also reported. Several BNP-M members were among the dead.
The chief minister of Balochistan, Sarfraz Bugti, denounced the bombing as a “cowardly act of the enemies of humanity.”
Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi blamed the attack on “India-backed terrorists and their facilitators,” without offering any evidence to support that assertion. Pakistani officials frequently accuse India of supporting Baloch separatists in a bid to destabilize Pakistan.
Al Jazeera News noted on Tuesday that several other terrorist attacks have occurred in Balochistan over the past few days, including a raid on a federal constabulary headquarters in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that killed six soldiers, and an attack near the Iranian border that claimed five victims. The constabulary raid was blamed on Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban.
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