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Troops, tribal militants clash in Pakistan, 3 dead

Posted on: Sunday, 26 March 2006, 08:19 CST

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)

Source: REUTERS

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