QUETTA: Security forces seized a vehicle packed with more than a tonne of explosives in the country's restive southwestern province of Balochistan, officials said Friday.

Government paramilitary troops recovered the vehicle along with a cache of ammunition and four suicide vests during a raid on a refugee camp close to the border with Afghanistan, officials said.

“A vehicle laden with explosives weighing 1,200 kilograms was recovered from an Afghan refugee camp in Roghani area near the Afghan border,” Frontier Corps (FC) spokesman Manzoor Ahmed told AFP.

He said two people had been arrested and taken to an undisclosed location for questioning.

“I cannot say which group the two men belong to but we had an intelligence tip-off that an explosive laden vehicle is about to be delivered in Quetta,” he said.

FC spokesman Khan Wasey also confirmed, while talking to Dawn.com, that two terrorists were arrested by forces during a successful raid conducted in Roghani area of Chaman. “Terrorists were preparing to carry out a major terror act either in Chaman or Quetta,” he said.

Chaman is Pakistan’s bordering town with Afghanistan and is considered a transit route for drug and weapons smugglers.

Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, was the scene of two of the deadliest bombings in Pakistan in recent years; in early 2013, blasts a month apart targeted Shia Muslims in the city, killing nearly 200.

Just last week, gunmen killed 20 construction workers and injured three others in a pre-dawn attack on a labourers’ camp near Turbat, in Balochistan’s Kech district.

Later in the week, Chief of the Army Staff General Raheel Sharif went to Quetta on a one-day visit to chair a meeting on the law and order situation in Balochistan. He commended law enforcement agencies in curbing terrorism in the province, and vowed to crush insurgency.

Resource-rich Balochistan is the largest of Pakistan's four provinces, but in addition to sectarian violence it also struggles with Islamist militancy and a separatist insurgency.