QUETTA: A girl was killed and 18 people, three security personnel among them, were injured in a bomb blast in the Sariab area on Saturday.

Police sources said that an improvised explosive device was planted in a rickshaw parked near Gahi Khan Chowk. The device went off when the vehicles of Frontier Corps passed by the rickshaw.

The wounded, including three women passersby and a seven-year-old girl, were shifted to civil hospital where the girl died.

“The condition of five people is serious,” hospital sources said.

Apparently, the target of the attack was the FC troops. “One FC vehicle was damaged in the blast,” Imran Qureshi, a police officer, told Dawn.

Sarbaz Baloch, who identified himself as spokesman for the banned Baloch Republican Army, in a call to the media said his group had carried out the attack.

City police chief Abdul Razzaq Cheema told AFP the wounded included up to eight children.

Quetta has been hit by numerous attacks in recent years, including two devastating bombings in early 2013 which killed nearly 180 people.

Balochistan is rich in copper, gold and natural gas but is the country’s least developed province. This has served to exacerbate a long-running nationalist and separatist movement.