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Roadside Blast Kills Five Pakistani Troops


Quetta, Pakistan
Quetta, Pakistan

Taliban insurgents in Pakistan have claimed responsibility for a roadside bomb attack that killed at least five paramilitary soldiers and wounded several others.

Police say Monday's bombing occurred on the outskirts of Quetta, the capital of the volatile Baluchistan province.

Militants set off the roadside improvised explosive device or IED in the Marget area, targeting a convoy of the Frontier Corps (FC) paramilitary force, officials said.

A spokesman (Mohammad Khorasani) for the Pakistani Taliban said it carried out the attack and claimed all the men on board one of the vehicles were killed.

The outlawed militant outfit is known for exaggerating the toll in such attacks.

The group was also behind last week's suicide blast outside a polio immunization facility in Quetta, in which at least 15 people, mostly police and FC personnel were killed.

Separately, an anti-terrorism court in Quetta Monday acquitted former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in a murder case involving the killing of a prominent Baloch nationalist leader, Akbar Bugti.

Bugti died in 2006 during a military operation Musharraf's government had launched in Baluchistan at the time to suppress a separatist insurgency in the region.

Nationalist Baloch leaders have been fighting for a greater share of revenue from their province's natural resources while militant groups are blamed for attacks against security forces and government installations in the resource-rich Pakistani region.

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