AFP QUETTA THREE bus passengers were killed and 12 others injured when a bomb planted in a parked motorbike exploded in Pakistan’s insurgency-hit province of Baluchistan on Monday, officials said.

The motorbike fitted with explosives had been left on the road linking the provincial capital Quetta with Iran, senior government official Naseebullah Bazai told AFP.

The incident happened near Dreengar town in Mastung district, about 40 kilometres south of Quetta.

“Three people were killed and a dozen others were wounded. It was a remotecontrolled bomb,” Bazai said, adding that the bus was badly damaged.

Mastung administration chief Shah Irfan confirmed the casualties and said several passengers with serious injuries had been rushed to hospital. “The target of the attack was not immediately clear,” he said.

Local officials said a passenger bus carrying pilgrims to Shiite holy sites in neighbouring Iran had passed the motorbike shortly before the blast.

“We are investigating if the target was the pilgrims’ bus,” Bazai said.

The attack came after 15 people were killed and 30 wounded in a bomb explosion outside a Sunni Muslim seminary in Quetta on Thursday.

There was no claim of responsibility for the latest incident, but the oil and gas rich Baluchistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, suffers from Islamist militancy, sectarian violence between majority Sunni and minority Shiite Muslim communities and a separatist insurgency.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed since Baluch rebels rose up in 2004 against the federal Pakistani government, demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the resources in the region.

Meanehile, in a separate development, a civil court on Monday sent three accused of the Fort Munro gang-rape case on a four-day physical remand.

The three men, belonging to the border military police (BMP), have been accused of sexually assaulting five girls from Lahore and Bahawalpur in the hill resort of Fort Munro.

The men had surrendered to the BMP commandant on Sunday after negotiations between administration and tribal elders who were earlier reluctant to hand them over.

The district administration produced the accused outlaws before magistrate Jahanzeb Amanullah Hafeez on Monday who granted a fourday physical remand of accused Amjid Ali, Mohammad Zafar and Naveed Ahmed.

The court also directed the administration to produce the accused before the court on June 15.

Five people, including the three BMP employees, had allegedly assaulted the girls at a border military police station in Fort Munro hill resort on Thursday night.

Two of the accused are still at large and law enforcement agencies are trying to arrest them, DCO Iftikhar Ali Sahu said.