Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said on Friday that India was the main sponsor of terrorism in Balochistan, as he provided details of the Jaffar Express train attack.
The attack began Tuesday afternoon when BLA terrorists ambushed the Quetta-Peshawar train carrying 440 passengers, opening fire and taking hostages. Security forces launched a two-day operation, concluding Wednesday evening. Lt Gen Chaudhry confirmed that all 33 terrorists were neutralised, with 21 passengers and four FC personnel killed, but no hostages harmed in the final rescue phase.
During today’s presser, Lt Gen Chaudhry said the terrorists had used both Indian and Afghan weapons in the recent incident and previous attacks.
“We must understand that in this terrorist incident in Balochistan, and others before, the main sponsor is your eastern neighbour (India)”.
DG ISPR then criticised the Indian media for spreading propaganda about the incident.
“The Indian media displayed fake footage of the incident to spread propaganda,” he said, as he showed some video clips on a screen to prove his point.
“They attempted to create a narrative by sharing AI-generated images and fake videos. They were leading an informational warfare.”
The DG ISPR said a “nexus” was working amid the situation to give legitimacy to the terrorists and their narrative.
Showing various clips of Indian officials and personalities discussing efforts to destabilise Balochistan, the DG ISPR said the Jaffar Express attack was a “continuation of the same policy.”
Providing a brief detail of the train attack again, he said that the terrorists had deliberately selected a remote location to conduct the attack.
“The reason I am mentioning the location is that the terrain was extremely difficult, making physical access very challenging. There were no mobile signals there either.”
Before the train was ambushed, he said, a large group of terrorists attacked a Frontier Corps picket, martyring three FC soldiers.
“They operated in multiple groups, taking strategic positions on higher ground. After planting the improvised explosive device (IED), which disabled the train, they took the passengers hostage,” he detailed.
He said some passengers were held inside the train while others were separated into three groups outside.
“A group of hostages was released based on their ethnic affiliations,” he said, adding that there were logistical reasons for the move since there were too many people in the train for the terrorists to control.
He said the terrorists tried to create a “false impression” of humanitarian values by claiming they had released some hostages.
Questioned if the attack represented an intelligence failure, the DG ISPR said that Balochistan presented a “very challenging intelligence environment”. He said agencies were working round the clock to find leads and preempt attacks.
“I don’t agree with the term ‘intelligence failure’ because behind this are thousands of intelligence successes you don’t hear about—the incidents that never happened because our intelligence detected and neutralised them.”
Speaking about the rise in terrorism, the DG ISPR said the pace of implementation of the National Action Plan’s 14 points needed to be considered first.
He said law enforcement agencies conducted 59,775 intelligence-based operations, both major and minor, in 2024. So far in 2025, 11,654 IBOs have been carried out.
“This year, we are averaging 180 IBOs per day,” he added. Meanwhile, around 1,250 terrorists were “sent to hell” in 2024 and 2025, while 563 security personnel were martyred in the line of duty, he said.
Taking over the press conference, CM Bugti said, “We’re in an intelligence-driven war waged against the state of Pakistan by RAW and other hostile agencies through Afghanistan especially because Afghan soil is being against us.”
Denouncing the attack on unarmed civilians, CM Bugti called the “so-called fight” against the state a farce, saying it was driven by purely evil forces and that the perpetrators should only be referred to as “terrorists.”
Echoing Chaudhry’s point, Bugti said the past policy of “appeasement” followed by some previous governments toward terrorist groups had allowed key figures to be released, enabling them to reestablish insurgent camps against the state.
Bugti said the security forces had the capacity and capability to “handle this mess very soon”, saying that such a surge was not a new thing.
When asked about the link between terrorism and the issue of missing persons, CM Bugti called it a “dicey subject” that had been debated for a long time.
“It is dicey because the count itself is unclear. I don’t want to justify anything—if even one person is missing, there is no justification. But there is a major difference between enforced disappearance and self-disappearance,” he added.
A day ago, a high-level security conference was held in Quetta, reaffirming the state’s resolve to counter any attempt to destabilise Pakistan with full force. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Chief of Army Staff General Syed Asim Munir, federal and provincial ministers, senior civil and military officials, and representatives of political parties attended the meeting, according to state-run Radio Pakistan.
Following the moot, PM Shehbaz, in a press conference, urged national unity and called on Pakistan’s political leadership to sit together with the military to discuss the challenges facing the country.
A National Assembly session was also held on Thursday, during which Defence Minister Khawaja Asif assailed the PTI for “politicising” the hijacking incident and “misinterpreting” the situation on social media.
The attack drew widespread condemnation from different countries, including China, the United States, Iran, and Germany.
BLA attacks
Balochistan has witnessed an uptick in terrorist attacks over the past year. In November 2024, at least 26 people were killed and 62 injured after a suicide blast ripped through a Quetta Railway Station.
In 2024, the banned BLA emerged as a key perpetrator of terrorist violence in Pakistan, according to a report by Islamabad-based think tank Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS).
In August last year, dozens of militants affiliated with BLA launched numerous attacks across the province, in which at least 50 people, including 14 security men, lost their lives. In response, security forces had neutralised 21 militants.
Earlier that month, then-Panjgur deputy commissioner Zakir Baloch was shot dead on the Quetta-Karachi National Highway, with CM Bugti stating that the BLA was the group behind it.
In October 2024, a suicide bombing near Karachi airport killed two Chinese nationals and a Pakistani citizen, for which two BLA suspects were sent to jail on judicial remand while a probe body was formed as well.
The group also claimed responsibility for the Quetta railway suicide bombing in November last year, in which at least 26 people, including 16 security personnel, lost their lives, and 61 others were injured.
Pakistan designated the BLA as a terrorist organisation in April 2006 after the group repeatedly attacked security personnel.
In January this year, a former BLA member said during a press conference that the banned group “brainwashed average citizens into thinking a certain way about Balochistan and resorting to terrorist activities.”
Last month, the BLA claimed responsibility for an attack in Balochistan’s Barkhan, where seven Punjab-bound passengers were offloaded from a bus and shot dead.
In earlier grand-scale hijackings in the country, one that particularly comes to mind was in 1994, when three armed militants from Afghanistan took control of a school bus near Peshawar and took around 70 children hostage. The bus was driven to the Embassy of Afghanistan in Islamabad, where units of elite commandoes gunned them down the next day.