QUETTA, Pakistan — As hundreds of mourners Saturday protested the killing of 22 people in bus hijackings in western Pakistan, the assaults raised fears that a long-simmering insurgency there could be growing more violent.
The country’s restive Baluchistan province has seen two major attacks in the span of a month, including an April assault on a dam project that killed at least 20 people and Friday’s bus hijackings.
In both, gunmen let Baluch people flee while killing others, signaling an ethnic bent to an insurgency seeking independence for the oil- and mineral-rich region that’s also home to Islamic terrorists.
Mureed Baluch, a terrorist who identifies himself as the spokesman of the United Baluch Army, which has attacked security forces in the past, claimed responsibility for Saturday’s bus attacks.
On Saturday, hundreds of Pashtuns, who make up about 35 percent of Baluchistan’s 9 million residents, placed 16 coffins with the bodies of their dead in front of the governor’s house in the provincial capital, Quetta.
