Shopkeeper injured in Quetta wine shop attack

QUETTA:

A wine shop was attacked with a hand grenade in a Quetta neighbourhood on Monday.

Unidentified men lobbed a hand grenade at the officially sanctioned wine shop located on Muneer Mengal Road, police said. The shop owner, Moti Ram, was injured in the attack.



Police rushed Ram to the Civil hospital where medics said his condition was critical. Police lodged a case against the unidentified assailants. Police were unsure about the possible motives. They speculated that religious extremists or extortionists could be behind the attack.

Separately, the paramilitary Frontier Corps, aided by the sleuths of an intelligence agency, arrested a suspected operative of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in a raid in Killa Saifullah district on Sunday.

According to a spokesperson for FC, the raid was conducted on the basis of intelligence reports about the presence of a TTP member in the Chanjan area. The suspected TTP man was shifted to an undisclosed location for questioning, he added.



Following Operation Zarb-e-Azb in the tribal areas, many militants are believed to have slipped into Balochistan in a bid regroup along the porous border with Afghanistan.

However, security forces have heightened operations against the militants, particularly in the border areas, and also the interprovincial boundary between Balochistan and Punjab.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 11^th, 2016.