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 departed 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 said 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 also killed, they said.
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There were nearly 400 passengers on the train when it was attacked. The BLA, which said 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”.
‘They just took people aside and shot them’
Passengers who have been freed in the security forces’ operation described their hours of captivity as “horrific”.
“I saw so many killings in front of my eyes and I knew that I was the next, but I escaped with other passengers and colleagues on Wednesday morning,” Ghulam Sarwar, 48, told Al Jazeera.
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 charged with guarding the passengers, a regular practice. When the attack began, he said he and the other armed personnel returned fire.
“It was like a rain of rockets and bullets on the train, but we retaliated with gunfire,” he recalled. “When we ran out of bullets, they came down and started pulling the passengers from the train.”
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The attackers began separating the passengers according to ethnicity by checking their identity cards, removing ethnic Punjabi passengers and those suspected of being part of the Pakistani military, and executing them. “They killed so many people,” Sarwar said. He could not count how many people were slain, he said, but he witnessed the fighters “just taking groups of people aside from the railway track and shooting them”.
“The killings continued until 10pm after a large number of attackers left the area after hugging some remaining fighters who stayed behind. They also killed anyone who attempted to escape,” Sarwar said.
In the morning, Sarwar and another group of passengers and security personnel managed to escape from the site where the hostages were being held. “We ran out in the morning but another railway policeman who was with me was hit by a bullet on his back after the attackers started shooting at us from the near mountains,” he said. The policeman was killed, he said.
As he and his fellow passengers fled, they were fired upon by the separatist fighters but managed 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.
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‘I saw a rocket hit the engine’
Murad Ali, 68, who was travelling to the southern city of Jacobabad with his wife, also witnessed the attack but was among 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 identity and ethnicity [Sindhi] and then allowed me to go,” he said.
“I accompanied dozens of women and children and we followed 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 told Al Jazeera. 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 added: “They pulled off all the passengers but they separated ethnic Punjabis from the rest of the passengers.”
On Wednesday, Pakistan’s security officials said its forces had killed 30 fighters in the operation to rescue the hostages and that security clearance was still going on.
Balochistan province’s Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti said the attack was an attempt by separatists to give the impression that Quetta is a “violent environment”.
The government said it had deployed additional soldiers to Quetta railway station, and dozens of coffins have been dispatched to the attack site aboard a relief train from Quetta station.
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Baloch separatists, who demand independence from Pakistan, accuse the state of abducting and persecuting those who speak out against it.
While this is the first time a whole train has been hijacked, there have been a series of attacks 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.
