14 passengers shot dead after being offloaded from bus in Pakistan
Karachi: Unidentified gunmen shot dead at least 14 passengers after forcing them to disembark from a bus on a highway in Pakistan's restive Balochistan province, a media report said Thursday.
According to Levies sources, around 15 to 20 unidentified gunmen in camouflage uniform reportedly stopped five or six buses travelling between Karachi and Gwadar.
They stopped a bus on the Makran Coastal Highway in Balochistan's Ormara area, checked the identity cards of passengers and offloaded about 16 of them.
At least 14 were shot dead, while two passengers managed to escape the massacre and made it to the nearest Levies check post. They were shifted to a hospital for treatment, the Dawn newspaper reported.
Levies and other law enforcement personnel reached the spot and launched an investigation into the incident. The bodies of the victims were recovered from Noor Baksh Hotel, the report said.
The motive behind the killings and the identity of the victims are yet to be ascertained.
Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, is Pakistan's largest and poorest province, rife with ethnic, sectarian and separatist insurgencies.
An ISIS suicide attack targeting Hazara Shias in the provincial capital of Quetta last week killed 21 people and injured 60 others.
Armed gunmen kidnapped about two dozen passengers from two Karachi-bound coaches from Balochistan's Mastung area in 2015, killing at least 19 of them in the mountainous area of Khad Kocha.
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Voting begins for high-stakes civic polls in Maharashtra; all eyes on big battle for Mumbai
Mumbai (PTI): Voting in 29 municipal corporations across Maharashtra began on Thursday morning with spotlight on Mumbai, where the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance is locked in an intense battle with the reunited Thackeray cousins for control of India's largest and richest civic body.
Polling for 2,869 seats spread across 893 wards in these municipal corporations began amid tight security at 7.30 am and will conclude at 5.30 pm. A total of 3.48 crore voters are eligible to decide the fate of 15,931 candidates.
In the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), whose annual budget is over Rs 74, 400 crore, 1,700 candidates are vying for 227 seats in elections being held after nine years, after a four-year delay. More than 25,000 police personnel have been deployed across Mumbai to oversee elections.
Except for Mumbai, the other urban bodies have multi-member wards. Vote count will take place on January 16.
These are the first BMC polls since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena when Eknath Shinde, now Deputy Chief Minister, broke away with a majority of the party’s MLAs and allied with the BJP to become the chief minister.
The undivided Shiv Sena held sway over India's richest civic body for 25 years (1997-2022).
In a significant political turn of events ahead of the elections, estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray, who head Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS, respectively, reunited last month after two decades in their bid to consolidate Marathi votes even as rival NCP factions forged a local alliance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The Congress, once a formidable political force in Maharashtra, has asserted its presence in Mumbai by stepping out of the shadow of its Maha Vikas Aghadi allies - Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP).
The grand old party has joined hands with Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh in the state capital.
Elections to the 29 municipal corporations are being held after a gap of several years, with terms of most of them having ended between 2020 and 2023. Of these, nine fall in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), the most urbanised belt in India.
Voting is underway in the following municipal corporations: Mumbai, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Navi Mumbai, Vasai-Virar, Kalyan-Dombivli, Kolhapur, Nagpur, Solapur, Amravati, Akola, Nashik, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Ulhasnagar, Thane, Chandrapur, Parbhani, Mira-Bhayandar, Nanded-Waghala, Panvel, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Latur, Malegaon, Sangli-Miraj-Kupwad, Jalgaon, Ahilyanagar, Dhule, Jalna and Ichalkaranji.
