QUETTA, Oct 24: People of the provincial capital and the towns of Ziarat, Pishin and Mastung faced problems in cooking food for Sehri early Tuesday morning because of inadequate gas pressure.

The pipeline was blown up on Monday night in the Dasht area, some 50 kilometres southeast of here.

The gas supply was partially restored at around 6am in the affected cities through a substitute gas pipeline.

A team of engineers of the Sui Southern Gas Company was flown into Quetta by a charted plane for repairing the damaged pipeline under strict security. Complete restoration of gas supply is expected in a day, SSGC officials said.

Meanwhile, a statement quoted the spokesman for the SSGC as saying that two pipelines had been damaged overnight supplying gas to Quetta and Kalat, temporarily lowering the pressure of gas supply to Quetta and complete shut down in Kalat district.

According to the statement, two terrorists somehow managed to enter the SSGC premises near Kalat. They tied down the security guard stationed there and installed powerful explosive device, setting it to blow up at 9:40pm, causing a complete suspension of gas supply in the entire district.

The spokesman said that in the second incident, the 20-inch diameter pipeline was blown up in Mastung district near Kolpur at around midnight, disrupting the gas supply to Quetta and three other districts of Balochistan.

He said that SSGC staff was doing everything to restore the gas supply as soon as possible but the repair work would take at least 24 hours.