QUETTA/GWADAR: Two officials of the Civil Aviation Authority were killed and another was injured in a pre-dawn attack on the Jewani Airport in Gwadar district on Sunday. The airport is located not far from the Iranian border.

The VOR (Very high frequency Omnidirectional Range) and radar systems at the airport were damaged in the attack. There were no security personnel at or around the airport at the time of the attack.

The attackers took away the in-charge of airport installations. The assailants killed him and dumped his body in a mountainous area. He was identified as Mehmood Ahmed Niazi.


There were no security personnel at or around the airport at the time of the attack


The banned Baloch Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the attack. “We carried out the attack on the airport,” Meerak Baloch, spokesman for the BLA, told journalists on phone from an unspecified place.

According to officials, about 12 men on motorcycles stormed the airport at around 3.30am. Armed with automatic weapons, they barged into the control room which housed navigational system and other equipment and started firing which killed electronic technician Khalil Ullah. Supervisor Altaf Hussain was injured.

“The attackers fired at the VOR tower and other installations and destroyed them,” a senior police officer in Jewani told Dawn on telephone.

“The militants also set the control room on fire before escaping,” Levies officials said.

Levies and FC personnel cordoned off the entire area.

The injured supervisor was taken to Gwadar and later shifted to the Agha Khan Hospital in Karachi.

CAA officials said the Jewani Airport had not been operational for 20 years.

“The airport is not being used for commercial or other flights,” a CAA official told Dawn, adding that the directional radar system and navigation instrument had been installed at the airport to guide international flights passing through the country’s airspace.

CAA’s spokesman Pervez Garage said the installations were damaged in the attack, but a back-up system was used to keep the system working.

A senor security official said the Levies personnel deployed at the airport had been withdrawn a few months ago when the security situation there appeared to be normal.

But after the Sunday attack, a heavy contingent of security personnel was deployed at the airport.

Balochistan Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch condemned the attack and the killing of CAA officials and directed the Makran division commissioner to submit a report.

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2015

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