An attack on a luxury hotel in the southwestern city of Gwadar was a bid to "sabotage prosperity", Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan said Sunday, as police confirmed all the attackers had been killed. The Chinese embassy in Islamabad also strongly condemned the incident. Local police said four gunmen, who had stormed the hotel, shooting dead a security guard, had been killed overnight by security forces.
“All four terrorists were killed and security forces had taken complete control of the hotel building,” a local police official in Gwadar told AFP via telephone. His account was confirmed by a security source in Islamabad. The military had said on Saturday that there were three gunmen.
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Mohammad Aslam, a police official in Gwadar, told AFP Saturday that only staff was present in the building at the time of the attack. The BLA is one of a myriad of insurgent groups fighting in tightly-guarded Balochistan province, which has been rocked by separatist, Islamist and sectarian violence for years.
Balochistan is tightly guarded by the Pakistani military, which has been targeting insurgents there since 2004. The army has been repeatedly accused by international rights groups of abuses there but denies all allegations.
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The attack was the second deadly attack in a prominent Pakistan city this week after a suicide blast claimed by the Pakistani Taliban at one of the country’s oldest and most popular Sufi shrines killed at least 12 people in the eastern city of Lahore.