Pakistan’s Election Commission said it was investigating. (representative)
Quetta:
An explosion near a political rally in Pakistan killed at least four people on Tuesday, officials said, as the country prepares to vote next week.
Police in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, said a bomb planted on a motorcycle detonated during a rally by supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
Senior police officer Farhan Zahid told AFP: “The PTI rally passed there but it is not clear if the rally was the target.”
Provincial health department spokesman Waseem Baig said that in addition to the four deaths, six people were injured.
PTI said in a statement that three activists were among those killed at the rally. A convoy of motorcycles and cars marched through the city to drum up support for a candidate ahead of national elections scheduled for February 8.
A party spokesman told AFP it was too early to tell whether they had been deliberately targeted.
Pakistan’s Election Commission said it was investigating.
The attack came hours after PTI founder Khan was sentenced to ten years in prison for leaking secret state documents.
Khan and the PTI say they are suffering an unprecedented crackdown aimed at preventing them from returning to power through the February 8 vote.
The 71-year-old former cricket star was ousted in 2022 and launched a campaign against Pakistan’s military kingmakers who he said were plotting to end his tenure as prime minister.
Since then, he has been dogged by numerous legal cases and barred from holding public office, while PTI has been largely squeezed out of the public sphere.
Pakistan has also been facing a security crisis, with a sharp increase in militant attacks since the Taliban returned to power in neighboring Afghanistan.
Casualties hit a six-year high last year, with more than 1,500 civilians, security forces and militants killed, according to the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad.
Islamabad blames the rise in attacks on the Taliban, saying they are not doing enough to root out the militants in Afghanistan.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
