KARACHI: Rangers on Saturday evening killed a suspected militant before he could carry out a suicide attack on a paramilitary team on the Sindh-Balo­chistan border near Hub.

A spokesperson for the Rangers said that the paramilitary force was conducting a random check near Mahi Garhi Mazar along the Hub river when they signalled a suspicious-looking pedestrian to stop.

He said the suspect started running towards the Rangers personnel and tried to blow himself up. “Due to the timely action of the snap-checking team the suicide vest of the attacker could not explode completely and the terrorist was killed on the spot.”

The spokesperson said that two Rangers personnel were hurt in the explosion and they were shifted to a hospital for treatment.

“The Rangers’ checkpoint in Hub was the possible target of the suicide attacker,” he said.

He said remaining explosives in the suicide vest were defused by a team of the bomb disposal squad.

The Rangers said they got intelligence that terrorists were planning to carry out an attack in Karachi and to thwart any such attack the paramilitary force was conducting checking on main roads and dirt roads along the Hub river.

“A search operation is going on in the area and law enforcement agencies are collecting evidence from the crime scene,” the Rangers official said.

A senior police officer, who wished not to be named, told Dawn that it was an attack on a mobile van of Rangers’ 71 Wing on Karachi-Hub border.

Counterterrorism official Raja Umer Khattab told Dawn that the last suicide attack on a Ranger’s mobile van in Karachi had taken place in North Nazimabad in 2015 in which three personnel were killed.

He said that attack was allegedly carried out by the Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2018