QUETTA, Pakistan (AFP) - - At least six Pakistani paramilitary troops and 30 separatist rebels have been killed in clashes in the troubled southwestern province of Baluchistan, security officials said Monday.
Security forces launched a major operation against rebel camps in the gas- and mineral-rich province after a convoy of Frontier Corps soldiers came under attack on Saturday, the officials said.
Troops also arrested 30 militants and destroyed two insurgent bases used for plotting attacks in the operation near Uch, a town in the restive Dera Bugti district of Baluchistan, they said.
Impoverished Baluchistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, has seen a recent flare-up in attacks by ethnic Baluch tribes seeking more political rights and a greater share of profits from the region's natural resources.
"Six Frontier Corps men have been killed and around 30 militants have been arrested. Militants have been killed in a big number but I don't have the exact figure," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP.
Other intelligence officials in Quetta said however that at least 30 insurgents, including three rebel commanders, had been killed. Twenty-two rebels were killed on Sunday alone in the heaviest of the clashes, they said.
"The entire operation started after these militants fired on a Frontier Corps convoy," the senior security official said.
"There were two camps there of these militants, they were destroyed last night. The militants were using these two camps to destroy (electricity) pylons, carry out bomb blasts and other terrorist activities," he said.
Dera Bugti is near Pakistan's biggest natural gas field and was formerly the base of late Baluch rebel leader Nawab Akbar Bugti, who was killed in a military operation in August 2006.
Hundreds of people have died in violence in the province since the insurgency flared in late 2004, but until recently it had quietened down after Bugti's death.
The province has also been hit by attacks blamed on Islamist Taliban militants, but officials say that the separatist insurgents do not have links to the hardliners.
Pakistani officials have previously accused rival India of sponsoring the separatist rebels from its consulates in southern and eastern Afghanistan, a charge that New Delhi denies.
Last Wednesday a bomb blast in the town of Mastung, 35 kilometres (22 miles) south of the provincial capital Quetta, wounded 14 people, including eight security personnel.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
