Troops, tribal militants clash in Pakistan, 3 dead

By Aamir Ashraf

DERA BUGTI, Pakistan (Reuters) – Two tribal militants and a
paramilitary trooper were killed in a gunbattle in the troubled
Pakistani province of Baluchistan, bordering Afghanistan, on
Sunday, officials said.

Elsewhere in the province, two home-made bombs exploded
outside the house of the provincial chief minister and
militants blew up a natural gas pipeline, but there were no
casualties in these incidents.

The violence happened as up to 1,500 pro-government Rahija
tribesmen returned to their home in the nearby town of Dera
Bugti under tight security cover from government forces.

Baluch militants attacked paramilitary Frontier
Constabulary (FC) troops with rockets and small arms near Loti,
where a natural gas field run by the state-owned Oil and Gas
Development Co Ltd., is located.

“After brief fighting, one of our soldiers was martyred and
we killed two miscreants,” Lieutenant-Colonel Furqan-ud-din of
FC told reporters in Dera Bugti.

He said two militants were wounded and had been arrested.

Two bombs exploded near the house of chief minister Jam
Mohammad Yousuf in Lasbela, around 400 km (250 miles) southwest
of Dera Bugti, demolishing a wall of the house, a provincial
government spokesman said. Yousuf was not in the house at the
time of the attack.

PRIVATE MILITIA

Furqan-ud-din blamed supporters of renegade tribal leader
Nawab Akbar Bugti for the attack near Loti and said they aimed
to disrupt the return of Rahijas to their homeland.

“The attackers belonged to the private militia of Akbar
Bugti,” he said.

Bugti or his aides were not immediately available for
comment. His top adviser and a grandson, Barahumdagh Bugti,
earlier accused the government of rehabilitating Rahija
tribesmen to stir tribal rivalries in the region.

Rahijas, rivals of Akbar Bugti, were expelled from Dera
Bugti in 1997.

“The rulers want tribesmen to fight each other so that they
could usurp their resources,” he told Reuters.

Baluch militants have been waging a low-level insurgency in
the resource-rich southwestern province for decades for greater
political and economic autonomy. They have intensified attacks
over the past year on government targets such as natural gas
and transport facilities.

The latest flare-up in violence in Baluchistan follows a
crackdown by Pakistani security forces on Baluch rebels after a
rocket attack on December 14 when President Pervez Musharraf
was visiting the town of Kohlu in the area.

The unrest in the province, which also borders Iran, is
another pressing security problem for Musharraf whose forces
are also battling al Qaeda-linked militants in tribal areas on
the Afghan border to the north of Baluchistan.

Analysts say there has been no evidence of cooperation
between the al Qaeda-linked rebels and Baluch militants.

(Additional reporting by Kamran Haider)