QUETTA / ISLAMABAD, Sept 18: At least five Pakistanis, a woman among them, were killed and 25 others injured when Afghan National Army personnel opened fire at a border village in Zhob district on Wednesday.

According to official sources, the woman and her three brothers were among the victims and a Levies man was injured in the pre-dawn incident.

Security personnel have reached the Karez Qamaruddin village. The Afghan forces started firing indiscriminately at the village without any provocation. Those killed belonged to the Loion tribe.

Personnel of Levies and other law-enforcement agencies took the injured to the Zhob hospital.

“The death toll may increase because 25 people have suffered bullet wounds and the condition of some of them is critical,” the sources said.

They said the Afghan forces were continuing to fire intermittently and Pakistani officials were trying to contact Afghan border authorities.

Zulfiqar Durrani, a senior administration official in Zhob, told AFP: “Their soldiers entered Pakistani territory to launch indiscriminate fire.”

AP quoted another official as saying that the victims might have strayed across the porous border to get fodder for their cattle.

However, Daulat Khan Zadran, police chief of Afghanistan’s Paktika province, said the men were Taliban militants killed in a confrontation with Afghan security forces. He said the bodies of three of the slain men were still in Afghanistan.

In Islamabad, the Afghan charge d’affaires was summoned to the Foreign Office on Wednesday and a strong protest was lodged over the death of five Pakistanis in cross-border firing.

The Foreign Office demanded an investigation into the incident and said Afghans must adhere to an agreed border coordination mechanism among Pakistan, Afghanistan and the International Security Assistance Force.

Under the tripartite agreement, military operation in an area of 4km on both sides of the border is not allowed except for instances in which the other side has been intimated about the activity.

“The recurrence of such incidents, which are detrimental to friendly relations and undermine goodwill between the two brotherly countries,” needed to be prevented, the Foreign Office spokesman said.