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China Warns That Baloch Liberation Army Will Pay Heavy Price For Karachi Terror Attack

On Tuesday, a woman suicide bomber killed four people, including three Chinese nationals, outside University of Karachi’s Confucius Institute.

April 27, 2022

Author

Statecraft Staff
China Warns That Baloch Liberation Army Will Pay Heavy Price For Karachi Terror Attack 
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin revealed that China has initiated its “ emergency response mechanism.”
IMAGE SOURCE: GLOBAL TIMES

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin vowed to work with Pakistani officials to investigate Tuesday’s bombing outside University of Karachi’s Confucius Institute, which killed three Chinese teachers and left another injured. “The blood of the Chinese people should not be shed in vain, and those behind this incident will surely pay the price,” he said.

Responding to a question on the incident, Wang remarked that China “expresses strong condemnation and indignation over this major terrorist attack, and extends deep condolences to the victims and sympathies to the injured and bereaved families.” He also informed that China’s missions in Pakistan had already “activated the emergency response mechanism immediately after the incident.” 

In addition, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Jianghao has discussed the issue with Pakistan’s Ambassador to China, Moin ul-Haque. According to Wang, the minister “demanded” that Pakistani authorities initiate a “thorough investigation of the incident, apprehend, and punish the perpetrators to the full extent of the law.”

In response, Pakistani Prime Minister (PM) Shehbaz Sharif, who visited the Chinese embassy in Pakistan to convey his condolences, reassured that there will be an “in-depth probe” and vowed to extend “exemplary punishment to the perpetrators” while also “strengthen[ing] [the] security of Chinese personnel, projects and institutions in Pakistan in an all-round way.”

Separately, Sharif tweeted that he “strongly condemns this cowardly act of terrorism” and promised that “the perpetrators will surely be brought to justice.”

In a letter cited by the state-owned Chinese state-owned media outlet Global Times (GT), Sharif condemned terror attacks “in all its forms and manifestations.” “The nefarious designs of the enemies of Pakistan-China Strategic Cooperative Partnership will neither dent our Iron Brotherhood nor impact our cooperation,” Sharif remarked.

Similarly, the Pakistani Foreign Office released a statement condemning the attack and vowed to provide “all possible assistance” to the victims. “The cowardly incident is a direct attack on the Pakistan-China friendship and ongoing cooperation. Pakistan and China are close friends and iron-brothers. Pakistan attaches great importance to safety and security of Chinese nationals, projects and institutions in Pakistan,” the release said. 

In this regard, Wu Jianghao also urged Pakistan to “take all possible measures to ensure the safety of Chinese citizens in Pakistan and prevent such incidents from happening again.”

Furthermore, the foreign ministry spokesperson informed that PM Sharif has confirmed that authorities in Sindh and Karachi have already initiated a “full-scale investigation to hunt down the perpetrators.”

China has urged its citizens in Pakistan to “not go out unless necessary.” Likewise, the Confucius Institute, which is run by the Chinese International Education, has called on all its institutions to protect its international staff.

The explosion occurred at around 2:20 PM, when a female suicide bomber, suspected to be a former University of Karachi student, attacked a bus carrying Chinese nationals to the university’s Confucius Institute. Apart from the three Chinese citizens, a local was also killed in the blast. The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, GT has suggested that the Pakistan Taliban, the Islamic State, and the East Turkistan Islamic Movement could also have been involved.

Several Pakistani leaders have condemned the attack, including Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and Minister of Information & Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb. Furthermore, Pakistan People’s Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said, “I am sure Sindh Police will ferret out the terrorists and they will soon be in the clutches of law.” Former PM Imran Khan, meanwhile, called the attack a “foreign-backed attempt” to target Pakistan’s growing ties with China.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’s deputy spokesperson, Farhan Haq, said that the UN chief regrets the incident and that the attack on education and teachers was “particularly condemnable.”

The recent suicide bombing is the latest in a string of attacks by the BLA against Chinese nationals in Pakistan. In 2017, ten workers were gunned down by two BLA members. The group said the purpose was to express its stern opposition to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Similarly, in 2018, the group attacked the Chinese Consulate-General in Karachi.

Soon after, two children of Chinese nationality were killed and three others wounded in an attack on the Gwadar port.

In 2019, a luxury hotel near a China-funded project in Balochistan was attacked by gunmen, killing eight people. 

More recently, last July, an explosion in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province caused a bus to tumble into a ravine, killing 12 people, including nine Chinese nationals. The New York Times reported that several Chinese passengers on the bus were engineers, surveyors, and mechanical staff working at a China-funded hydroelectric project in Dasu in the Upper Kohistan district. 

In response to the Dasu attack, China and Pakistan signed an agreement to broaden their counter-terrorism and security cooperation framework. Furthermore, according to a report by the Daily Sun, a Bangladeshi newspaper, Ayman Bilal, the Major General of the Pakistani Army, admitted to being tasked by China with ending the freedom movement in Balochistan. However, while this resulted in enhanced security at CPEC projects, “soft targets” like the China-run Confucius Institute remain vulnerable to such attacks.

The BLA argues that the region does not receive its fair share of revenue from the mineral and petrochemical extraction operations in its region and that the employment opportunities generated by the CPEC are awarded to Chinese nationals. Balochistan’s residents also think that the project is imperialistic, as the influx of tourism and industrial processes into the region would reduce the ethnic dominance of the Baloch people.

Consequently, Pakistan has deployed its military and paramilitary to the region to protect the project and its workers, and has even blamed India for rising unrest in Balochistan. Authorities have frequently conducted aggressive security operations in the region. In fact, on April 16, security forces opened fire against unarmed people in Chagai, killing six people and leaving several others injured. In response, several Baloch legislators protested against the government’s “agenda” of killing and targeting Baloch people.

Even the Baloch people who do escape the country are seemingly not spared. In December 2020, Canadian authorities found the body of Ms. Karima Baloch—a Pakistani human rights activist from the Baloch community—in Toronto, where she had been living in exile since 2016. The event sparked an intense debate about the foreign overreach of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the nation’s primary intelligence agency. 

She was the second Pakistani dissident to die under mysterious circumstances that year. In March 2020, Sajid Hussain, a Pakistani activist and journalist who often wrote on human rights abuses in Balochistan and was living in Sweden, was reported missing. His body was found almost two months later in a river near the Swedish town of Uppsala; Swedish police, at the time, ruled out any “visible wrongdoing” and the cause of death was said to be drowning.

It is expected that the latest attack will result in a fresh crackdown on the Baloch people by Pakistani security forces, not only to defeat their independence movement but also to protect crucial economic interests in the region. 

Author

Statecraft Staff

Editorial Team

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