Kuwait, Pakistan – The survivors described the kidnapping of the deadly train on Tuesday by the separatists as a blush how they saw his colleagues who were executed and escaped during the shooting.

Dozens of fighters belonging to the Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) targeted nine vehicles from Jafar Express with rocket -grenades and gunshots as they pass through the tunnels in the colonial era in the rugged mountain Polan Corridor.

The train, which left from Quetta, the regional capital of the southwestern Baluchistan Province, at 9 am (04:00 GMT) for Beshawar, the capital of northwest of Khyber Bakhtonguhua, was attacked near Sibi City, about 160 km (100 miles) from Kuwait, in 1pm (08:00 GMT).

The train road makes a trip of more than 1,600 km (994 miles) via Punjab to reach its final destination, Peshawar. The journey takes about 30 hours, with a stop at about 30 stations throughout the country.

On Wednesday night, the Pakistani security forces said they had concluded a military operation against the fighters, rescued 346 passengers, and all of them were killed. But 26 travelers, train driver and paramilitary soldiers were killed.

There were approximately 400 travelers on the train when he was attacked. BLA, which she said was holding passengers as hostages, on Tuesday, granted the Pakistani government permanently 48 hours, calling for “the unconditional release of political prisoners in Al -Shoh, they disappeared by force and national resistance activists.”

“They took people aside and shot them.”

The passengers who were released in the security forces operation described the families’ hours as “horrific”.

“I saw a lot of killings in front of my eyes and I knew that I was the next, but I fled with the passengers and other colleagues on Wednesday morning,” said Ghulam Sarwar, 48.

He was one of the railway police assistants in Pakistan, and was on the train and then boldly escaped with a group of passengers and gunmen colleagues.

Sarwar was traveling on the train from the Quetta railway station, along with four armed railways and five soldiers accused of guarding passengers, a regular practice. When the attack began, he said that he and the other armed individuals have returned fire.

He recalls, “It was a rain of rockets and bullets on the train, but we took revenge on the shooting,” he recalls. “When he run out of bullets, they went down and started withdrawing the passengers from the train.”

The attackers began separating the passengers according to race by verifying their identity cards, removing the ethnic Punjabi passengers and suspected that they were part of the Pakistani army, and their implementation. “They have killed many people,” Saarwar said. He said he could not calculate the number of people who were killed, but he saw the fighters “just taking groups of people aside from the railway path and shooting them.”

“The killings continued until 10 pm after a large number of the attackers left the area after they embraced some of the remaining fighters who remained behind them. They also killed anyone who tried to escape.

In the morning, Sawar and another group of passengers and security personnel managed to escape from the site where the hostages were detained. He said: “We escaped in the morning, but another railway policeman was with me. He said the policeman was killed.

While he and his colleagues escaped from the passengers, they were shot by separatist fighters, but they managed to make it 6 kilometers (4 miles) along the tracks to the nearby railway station in Bandir, where the Pakistani security forces were waiting for them to be received.

“I saw a missile hit the engine”

Murad Ali, 68, who was traveling to the southern city of Jacobad with his wife, also witnessed the attack but was among those who were allowed to be liberated by the attackers. “I saw a missile hitting the train engine after we heard the fire. They came inside our cabin and asked my identity and race [Sindhi] Then I was allowed to go. “

“Dozens of women and children were accompanied and we followed the railway path for six kilometers on foot until we arrived at the Bandir railway station after the dusk, where the security forces took us to the Mach railway station,” he told Al -Jazeera. Then the couple returned to Quetta.

Baby Farzana, the wife of Murad, described the train as “completely covered with smoke due to fire and explosions.” She added, “They withdrew all passengers, but they separated the ethnic Punjabi from the rest of the passengers.”

On Wednesday, Pakistani security officials said that its forces had killed 30 fighters in the operation to save the hostages and that security clearance is still going on.

The Prime Minister of Balochistan, Sarvraz Boujti, said the attack was an attempt by the separatists to give the impression that Quetta is a “violent environment.”

The government said it had deployed additional soldiers at the Quetta railway station, and dozens of coffins were sent to the attack site on the relief train from the Quetta station.

The separatists, who are asking for independence from Pakistan, accuses the kidnapping and persecution of those who speak against it.

While this is the first time that a full train has been kidnapped, there is a series of attacks on trains in the past two years.

Recently, in November 2024, the separatists killed nearly 30 passengers – most of them Pakistani soldiers – in a suicide bombing at the Quetta station where the Javar Express was about to leave the station.