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Karachi: At least 70 terrorists, some of them from the BLA, were killed after they carried out attacks on security forces, law enforcement agencies and civilians at 12 different locations in Pakistan's Balochistan province, officials said Saturday.
Sources in the security forces put the number of terrorists killed to 108, however, Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfaraz Bugti, in a tweet, said 70 terrorists have been killed so far and the operations that started on Friday night are still ongoing on Saturday evening. A federal minister said terrorists from the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) killed civilians in Gwadar.
Ten security personnel were also killed during the operations that came after 41 terrorists were killed in two different counter-terror measures in Panjgur and Harnai of the province on Thursday and Friday.
Shahid Rind, the spokesperson for the Balochistan government, said that the attacks were carried out at different locations, including at Quetta, Gwadar, Makram, Hub, Chaman, Naseerabad, in the province.
"The attacks targetted police, frontier corps and civilians at different locations between Friday and Saturday night," Rind said on telephone.
Federal Information Minister Ataullah Tarar confirmed on Geo News channel the death of 10 security personnel in the operations but said when the terrorists attacked at the locations, the forces were alert and thwarted these attacks successfully forcing them to flee.
In Gwadar, terrorists belonging to the BLA had killed a family of five, including a woman and three children, Tarar said.
Rind said identification of the dead terrorists is in process and it would be confirmed only later whether they belonged to insurgent groups only or also included the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) outfit.
Federal Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said that all the attacks by the terrorists were averted by the forces. He also confirmed that 10 policemen and paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) personnel were killed in these attacks.
He added that terrorists had laid a large number of explosives on a railway track in the Naseerabad district, which were later removed by the bomb disposal squad.
Earlier on Friday, the army and officials said that security forces killed 52 terrorists, mostly belonging to the Taliban, in separate operations across three provinces.
Six terrorists were killed in Punjab province early Friday while on Thursday, 41 were killed in two separate intelligence based operations (IBOs) in Balochistan and five Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) men, including a commander, were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
There has been a surge in violence in Balochistan in recent years. Balochistan had an upward trend, with fatalities increasing from 787 to 956; an additional 169 deaths, which are nearly 22 per cent higher than the previous year's figures, data from think tank Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) showed in the January first week.
An Islamabad-based think tank Pak Institute for Peace Studies said there had been an escalation -- by 34 per cent -- in terror attacks and violence in 2025, with as many as 699 terrorist attacks recorded countrywide during the year.