QUETTA: At least two ‘rudimentary’ drones were shot down in Qila Abdullah and Chagai districts of Balochistan, officials said on Friday.

A senior official of the Balochistan government told Dawn that two drones entered Pakistan’s airspace from Afghanistan on Thursday, and were spotted over the Gulistan area of Qila Abdullah, and the old Afghan refugee camp in Chagai.

“Both the Afghan drones were shot down by Pakistani fighters who intercepted them,” he said, adding that their wreckage had been taken into custody.

Meanwhile, the federal information ministry said that a rudimentary drone that intruded into Pakistani airspace near Shinko in KP’s Khyber district, was also “immediately identified and neutralised by the alert air defence system of the Pakistan Air Force”.

Information ministry terms Kabul’s claims of attacking alleged terror camps ‘false as usual’

It also refuted Afghan Taliban claims of targeting alleged terrorist camps in the border areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, saying: “The claims are false as usual”.

Earlier, the Afghan Taliban regime’s defence ministry said in a post on X that terrorist hideouts in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had been targeted by the Afghan air force on Thursday night.

Terrorist camps, including “those of Daesh and more than two dozen other terrorist organisations are factually located, run and patronised from inside the territories under control of [the] Afghan Taliban regime”, said a post on the ministry’s fact-checking account, @FactcheckerMoIB.

It asserted that the Taliban regime was “used to [issuing] such fake and nefarious statements” to cover their “patronisation of terror waged in neighbouring countries and region, including that from Daesh, Fitna Al Khawarij, Fitna Al Hindustan and others”.

The government uses the term ‘Fitna Al Khawarij’ to refer to the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its affiliates. It uses the term ‘Fitna Al Hindustan’ to refer to groups it accuses of being sponsored by India to execute terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil.

The development comes over a week after Pakistan carried out strikes on terrorist hideouts along its border with Afghanistan, which Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said killed 26 terrorists.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2026