The Jaffar Express, which left Quetta at 9 am and was headed to Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has been taken over by armed Baloch rebels. The train was coming to a halt in Sibi district – a mountainous area of Balochistan that borders Afghanistan and Iran – when six assailants opened fire.

The authorities were struggling to reach the remote site of the ambush in the country’s southwest, and the passengers’ fate was not immediately known.

Armed militants held hundreds of train passengers hostage on Tuesday in an ongoing siege claimed by a separatist group behind rising violence in southwestern Pakistan. The attack was claimed by the