At least seven people were killed and several others wounded on Thursday in two suicide attacks at a military check-post near Quetta, officials said. As people converged on the scene of the first bombing near the Quetta, a second suicide bomber blew himself up, Balochistan police chief Saud Gohar told AFP.
Three soldiers and four civilians were killed, military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP. A senior security official said the death toll was 11, with seven military personnel killed, but the army spokesman declined to confirm this figure.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the attacks, which come just two days before President Pervez Musharraf is set to lift a controversial state of emergency he imposed on last November 3, citing violence.
The military has been the primary target in a wave of suicide attacks across the country since the army raided the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad in July, leaving more than 100 people dead, most of them militants.
"This is the first time that a suicide attack has taken place in this part of the city," Arshad told a private TV channel. "There were two people involved in the attack."
An AFP photographer said the site of the blast had been cordoned off and journalists were blocked from approaching. The sirens of ambulances were heard carrying the wounded toward a nearby military hospital. The military erected road barricades nearby, snarling traffic in the city.
Ethnic Baloch rebels are also active in the region but are not known for carrying out suicide attacks, which are a hallmark of militants who sometimes infiltrate from across the border in Afghanistan.
But the attacks come amid heightened tension in violence-plagued Balochistan since the controversial death of a leading ethnic Baloch insurgent last month. Balochistan has been in the grip of a three-year insurgency launched by ethnic Baloch rebels who want more political rights and a greater share of profits from the region's natural resources.