14 killed, 49 Injured In Pakistan Train Blast

An explosion has ripped through a train in Pakistan’s restive southwestern province of Balochistan, killing at least 14 people, officials said.
The bomb went off on the Rawalpindi-bound Jaffer Express in a carriage reserved for men in the town of Sibi about 160km south of the provincial capital of Quetta.

Local hospital treated 44 injured men and five seriously injured were flown to Quetta via helicopter, the district commissioner told Al Jazeera.

Two carriages of the train caught fire after the blast but the flames had since been extinguished, senior police official Mohammad Nazar said.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it came a day after paramilitary troops said they had launched an operation in the violence-racked province and killed around 40 armed men.

Resource-rich Balochistan is home to a long-running separatist conflict that was revived in 2004, with nationalists seeking to stop what they see as the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and alleged rights abuses.