Quetta, Jan 20,2023: At least eight people were injured in an explosion near a railway track in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on Friday, a senior Railways official said.

Pakistan Railways spokesperson in Balochistan, Muhammad Kashif, told Dawn that the blast occurred when the Peshawar-bound Jaffer Express was passing by the Paneer area. The train was coming from Mach area.

As a result of the blast, six bogies of the train derailed causing injuries to at least eight people, he added, Dawn reported.

The injured were shifted to a nearby hospital while an emergency has been declared across all hospitals in the district.

Meanwhile, Deputy Commissioner Kach Agha Samiullah also confirmed the incident and said it was a remote-control explosion that derailed multiple bogies of the train.

He said rescue teams had been dispatched to the spot.

Police have not yet issued a statement on the incident.

On December 25, six security personnel, including a captain, were killed while at least 17 people suffered injuries in different incidents of terrorism across Balochistan.

The military’s media wing had said that an IED went off close to the leading party of the security forces.

The statement further said that the sanitisation operation continued in the area to apprehend the suspects involved in the attack.

In another statement, the ISPR had said that an operation against militants in the Sambaza area of Zhob left one security man killed. One terrorist was killed, while two personnel were injured.

The ISPR had further said the forces were conducting an operation in Sambaza on the basis of intelligence reports to deny militants the use of suspected routes to move across the “Pakistan-Afghanistan border to sneak into KP along the interprovincial boundary and target citizens and security forces”, Dawn reported.