Balochistan: In an incident in Balochistan's Musa Khel, the Territories stopped a convoy of vehicles coming from Pakistan's Punjab, including a passenger bus and killed 23 people in the firing incident that occurred in the Rarasham area of Tingri tehsil, Samaa TV reported.

As per the Superintendent of Police, the terrorists stopped the vehicles, offloaded the passengers, checked their National Identity Cards (NICs), killed them on the spot, and later torched various vehicles.

The incident happened on the national highway, 72 kilometres from the district headquarters.

Rarasham is a small town in the Union Council of Kingri district, Musakhel, as per Samaa TV.

The accused stopped the vehicles on the national highway and fired at the passengers in the same old pattern in which various labourers were gunned down in past incidents in the southwestern province.

According to Samaa TV, a heavy contingent of Levies and police reached the spot. According to the Balochistan Levies officials, the dead bodies of the passengers are being shifted to hospital.

Meanwhile, in a similar incident in April, twelve people were killed in two separate firing incidents along the National Highway in the Nushki district of Balochistan.

The first incident took place as a bus carrying passengers from Quetta to Taftan was targeted by armed assailants. Nine passengers were kidnapped from the bus and subsequently shot to death.

The Noshki SSP said the victims were identified and then killed, adding that they hailed from Mandi Bahauddin, Gujranwala, and Wazirabad cities in Punjab. He said their bodies were discovered in a desolate, mountainous area.

Simultaneously, in the other incident, a vehicle plying on the National Highway was fired upon, in which two people were killed by armed individuals. Three others were injured.

The victims were residents of Nushki itself. Later, one of the injured persons also passed away during treatment, raising the overall death toll in the two incidents to 12.

The district deputy commissioner, Habibullah Musakhail, confirmed the incident and said the victims' bodies were later found beneath a bridge after a search by police and paramilitary forces. He said that among the dead were nine bus passengers.

Approximately 12 armed men, according to the police, had blocked the N-40 Regional Corporations Development (RCD) highway. The attackers stopped a bus and took nine passengers to the nearby mountains, where they were shot dead, after verifying the national identity cards.

(With Inputs From Pakistani Media)