An attack on a luxury hotel in the Pakistani city of Gwadar was a bid to “sabotage prosperity,” Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said yesterday, as police confirmed that all the attackers had been killed.
At least one person was shot dead on Saturday after gunmen stormed a luxury hotel in the southwestern Pakistani city of Gwadar, the centerpiece of a multibillion dollar Chinese infrastructure project.
A Baloch separatist group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter.
Photo: Reuters
“Such attempts, especially in Balochistan, are an effort to sabotage our economic projects and prosperity. We shall not allow these agendas to succeed,” Khan said in a statement issued by his office.
The Chinese embassy in Islamabad also strongly condemned the incident.
Police said that four gunmen who had stormed the hotel, shooting dead a security guard, had been killed overnight by security forces.
“All four terrorists were killed and security forces had taken complete control of the hotel building,” a local police official in Gwadar told reporters by telephone.
His account was confirmed by a security source in Islamabad.
Mohammad Aslam, a police official in Gwadar, on Saturday told reporters that only staff were present in the building at the time of the attack.
The Pearl Continental, part of Pakistan’s largest five-star hotel chain, is the only luxury hotel in Gwadar.
It sits isolated on a ridge overlooking the Arabian Sea port city that was formerly a small fishing village, but now touted by officials as “the next Dubai” thanks to the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the corridor seeks to connect China’s Xinjiang region with Gwadar.
It would provide China with safer and more direct access to the oil-rich Middle East than the waterway trade route it uses through the narrow Malacca Strait.
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