QUETTA: At least 19 Frontier Corps personnel were injured, three of them seriously, when a bomb placed by militants near Sibi exploded when three FC vehicles were passing through the area.

The outlawed Baloch Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the attack.

Sources said the vehicles were going to a checkpost in Sibi Tali area.

The FC troops rushed to the area after the blast and took the injured to the Combined Military Hospital in Sibi.

“The condition of three soldiers is serious because they suffered multiple wounds,” Levies’ officials quoted hospital sources as saying.

“An IED was used to target the convoy and it was detonated with remote control,” the sources said.

A spokesman for the Frontier Corps said that one vehicle was destroyed and another was partially damaged.

Sources said that the Frontier Corps were carrying out a search operation in Sibi and Tali areas.

Azad Baloch, a spokesman for banned Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), told journalists in Quetta by phone from an unspecified place that his organisation was behind the attack. He claimed that 10 security personnel had been killed and 17 injured in the attack, but FC and provincial government sources denied the BLA claim.