The attack occurred in Shangla, a district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where thousands of Chinese nationals work on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which includes a multitude of megaprojects such as road construction, power plants and agriculture. The CPEC is a lifeline for Pakistan’s cash-strapped government, currently facing one of its worst economic crises.
The five were engineers and laborers heading Tuesday to the Dasu Dam, the biggest hydropower project in Pakistan, where they worked. Their remains were transported to the capital, Islamabad, local police official Altaf Khan said, adding that the deceased had a police escort when the attack happened.
Pakistani officials said they shared the latest investigation developments with their Chinese counterparts. China is expected to send its own experts Wednesday to the attack site to conduct an independent investigation while collaborating with Pakistani authorities.
Khan said they have further expanded a search that started a day earlier, looking for the attacker’s possible accomplices.
No group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion is likely to fall on separatists as well as a breakaway Gul Bahadur faction of Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, and is a separate group, but a close ally of the Afghan Taliban.
The TTP denied being behind the attack in a statement Wednesday, saying: “We are in no way related to the attack on the Chinese engineers.”
Tuesday’s attack came less than a week after Pakistani security forces killed eight Baluchistan Liberation Army militants who opened fire on a convoy carrying Chinese citizens outside the Chinese-funded Gwadar port in the volatile southwestern Baluchistan province.
The Chinese foreign ministry condemned the attack and offered “deep condolences to the deceased” in a statement Wednesday.
The ministry said China has asked “Pakistan to thoroughly investigate the incident as soon as possible, hunt down the perpetrators, and bring them to justice” and added that “any attempt to undermine China-Pakistan cooperation will never succeed”.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised a swift conclusion to the investigation during a visit with the Chinese ambassador, Jiang Zaidong, on Tuesday.
Chinese laborers working on CPEC-related projects in Pakistan have come under attack in recent years.
In July 2021, at least 13 people, including nine Chinese nationals, were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his vehicle near a bus carrying several Chinese and Pakistani engineers and laborers, prompting the Chinese companies to suspend work at the time. Pakistani authorities at the time initially insisted it was a road accident, but China disputed the claim, saying victims were the target of a suicide attack.