Repeated gunfire has been heard on Wednesday at the train that separatists hijacked a day earlier.
The authorities report that all hijackers have been killed – between 30 and 80 people have been mentioned by sources to various news agencies – and that all passengers have been rescued.
The exact number is unclear, earlier security forces reported that 190 people had been rescued, initially the number of hostages was reported to be 450 passengers.
Rumors in circulation
At the same time, the military tells the AFP news agency that 21 hostages were killed in the attempts to free them. According to sources to the Reuters news agency, it was rather around 50 people even before the operation to free all had been completed.
Many rumors are in circulation and it is unclear how many were actually held by the BLA (Baloch Liberation Army) since the group blew up part of the rail track in a mountainous area southeast of the city of Quetta and stopped the train.
Those who were freed and taken to safety describe to the BBC the train and the gunfire that took place as "apocalyptic scenes".
We held our breath throughout the gunfire, without knowing what would happen, says a former hostage, Ishaq Noor.
Escalating conflict
The freed and several who managed to escape the hijackers' violence describe a difficult journey to safety. In the mountainous area, they were forced to walk for up to four hours before they got help. Many of them had to carry injured or weakened people on their backs.
We reached the next train station with great difficulty, we were tired and we had children and women with us, says passenger Muhammad Ashraf to the BBC.
The separatists – who are fighting for an independent Baluchistan – treated passengers from the province better than others, say both witnesses, and Ishaq Noor says that he and his family were allowed to leave the train when he said they lived in Baluchistan.
The BLA has long fought for an independent Baluchistan – the poorest province in Pakistan – and hides among other things on the other side of the border to Afghanistan. In recent years, the conflict has escalated and the BLA has carried out many violent acts and attacks.
The province is the poorest in Pakistan and the Baluchistan Liberation Army often motivates its actions by saying that the outside world profits from the region's resources.
The historical region of Baluchistan stretches into Afghanistan and Iran. In the Pakistani province, around nine million people live, mainly Baluchis and Pashtuns, many of whom were separated from clan relatives in Afghanistan by a British border drawing in 1893.
The ongoing wave of violence started after the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in 2021 and the Pakistani government accuses the Taliban regime there of protecting the armed separatists.
