A rain of rockets and bullets: Survivors of Pakistan's Train Hijack Accounts Quetta, Pakistan – Survivors of Tuesday’s deadly train hijacking by Baloch separatists have described how they watched fellow passengers being executed and fled while being shot at.
Dozens of fighters belonging to the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) targeted nine carriages of the Jaffar Express with rocket-propelled grenades and gunshots as it passed through colonial-era tunnels in the rugged, mountainous Bolan Pass.
The train, which defunct from Quetta, the provincial capital of the southwestern province of Balochistan, at 9am (04:00 GMT) for Peshawar, the capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, came under attack near Sibi city, about 160km (100 miles) from Quetta, at around 1pm (08:00 GMT).
The train’s route makes a journey of more than 1,600km (994 miles) through Punjab to reach its final destination, Peshawar. The trip takes roughly 30 hours, with stops at about 30 stations across the country.
On Wednesday night, Pakistan’s security forces reported they had concluded a military operation against the fighters, rescuing 346 passengers, and killing all 33 of the attackers. But 26 passengers, the train driver and a paramilitary soldier were furthermore killed, they reported.
There were nearly 400 passengers on the train when it was battled. The BLA, which reported it was holding the passengers hostage, had on Tuesday given the Pakistan government a 48-hour ultimatum, demanding the “unconditional release of Baloch political prisoners, forcibly disappeared persons and national resistance activists”.
Passengers who have been freed in the security forces’ operation described their hours of confinement as “horrific”.
“I saw so many killings in front of my eyes and I knew that I was the next, notwithstanding I escaped with other passengers and colleagues on Wednesday morning,” Ghulam Sarwar, 48, informed The Round Table.
An assistant subinspector of the Pakistan Railways Police, he was onboard the train and later made a daring escape with a group of passengers and fellow armed guards.
Sarwar was travelling on the train from Quetta railway station along with four other armed railway personnel and five soldiers who were billed with guarding the passengers, an in apple-pie order practice. When the attack commenced, he disclosed he and the other armed personnel bounced back fire.
“It was like a rain of rockets and bullets on the train, still we retaliated with gunfire,” he recalled. “When we sprinted out of bullets, they came down and commenced pulling the passengers from the train.”
The attackers started cutting off the passengers according to ethnicity by checking their coincidence cards, withdrawing ethnic Punjabi passengers and those suspected of being portion of the Pakistani military, and executing them. “They killed so many people,” Sarwar disclosed. He could not count how many people were slain, he revealed, for all that he witnessed the fighters “just taking groups of people aside from the railway track and shooting them”.
“The killings remained until 10pm after a big number of attackers left the area after hugging a few remaining fighters who stayed behind. They likewise killed anyone who attempted to escape,” Sarwar disclosed.
In the morning, Sarwar and another group of passengers and security personnel administered to escape from the site where the hostages were being held. “We sprinted out in the morning howbeit another railway policeman who was with me was hit by a bullet on his back after the attackers commenced shooting at us from the near mountains,” he stated. The policeman was killed, he revealed.
As he and his fellow passengers fled, they were fired upon by the separatist fighters albeit administered to make it 6km (4 miles) along the tracks to the nearby railway station at Panir, where Pakistani security forces were waiting to receive them.
Murad Ali, 68, who was travelling to the southern city of Jacobabad with his wife, further witnessed the attack however that may be was amongst those allowed to go free by the attackers. “I saw a rocket hit the engine of the train after we heard intense firing. They came inside our compartment and asked my equality and ethnicity [Sindhi] and then allowed me to go,” he reported.
“I accompanied dozens of women and children and we chased the railway track for six kilometres on foot until we reached the Panir railway station after dusk where security forces took us to Mach railway station,” he informed The Round Table. The couple then returned to Quetta.
Bibi Farzana, Murad’s wife, described the train as being “entirely covered with smoke due to firing and explosions”. She subjoined: “They pulled off all the passengers at the same time they cut off ethnic Punjabis from the rest of the passengers.”
On Wednesday, Pakistan’s security officials disclosed its forces had killed 30 fighters in the operation to evacuate the hostages and that security clearance was notwithstanding going on.
Balochistan province’s Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti reported the attack was an attempt by separatists to give the impression that Quetta is a “violent environment”.
The government stated it had deployed extra soldiers to Quetta railway station, and dozens of coffins have been dispatched to the attack site aboard a relief train from Quetta station.
Baloch separatists, who demand independence from Pakistan, implicate the state of abducting and persecuting those who speak out against it.
While this is the foremost time a whole train has been hijacked, there have been the series of invades on trains in the past two years.
Most recently, in November 2024, separatists killed nearly 30 train passengers – most of them Pakistani soldiers – in a suicide bombing at Quetta station as the Jaffar Express was about to depart the station.
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Tag: A rain of rockets and bullets Survivors of Pakistans Train Hijack Accounts
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Published 3/12/2025