Balochistan Home Minister Ziaullah Langau said on Wednesday that banned outfits Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) were working together to carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan with India as their “single investor”.
He made the statement during a press conference in Quetta, where he shared that security forces had arrested two key militant commanders – TTP’s Nasrullah aka Maulvi Mansoor and Idrees aka Irshad – and then showed a recorded statement of the former.
According to state-run Radio Pakistan, Nasrullah was rounded up by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies “as a result of a very complicated and difficult operation”.
After showing Nasrullah’s video statement, Langau said, “The global community should have no doubt left that there is an international terrorist country, India, behind all this.”
The minister highlighted that while the TTP vowed to “introduce an Islamic system”, the BLA on the other hand was their “ideological opposite”. “Their nexus only means that their investor is the same who is using them from two angles,” he asserted.
“If you look at the financial [support] or the intelligence of the BLA and the TTP, or their members sitting abroad, there is no doubt that RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) is funding them,” Langau stated.
According to the home minister, Nasrullah was a core committee member of the TTP and also a part of its defence commission.
Langau urged the youth and women of Balochistan to “recognise” the aims of terrorists, stressing that those “enticing them and taking them to the mountains had no connection with our rights”. “Not all the people who have gone to the mountains are in collusion with our enemies; they have been enticed and misled,” he said, highlighting that Pakistan was their own country and calling on them to stand with the security forces and the government.
Earlier this month, 10 people had been kidnapped from a picnic spot in Harnai a few days ago, with the BLA claiming it was responsible for it.
Last month, the Balochistan government had revealed the arrest of two suspects in connection with the murder of seven labourers hailing from Punjab in the coastal town of Sarbandan. A Balochistan Counter Terrorism Department official had said both suspects belonged to the BLA.
A BLA spokesperson had also claimed responsibility for the killing of nine passengers in April after offloading them from a Taftan-bound bus in Noshki. In the video statement, Nasrullah stated he belonged to South Waziristan’s Sararogha tehsil and had worked from Baitullah Mehsud’s platform before joining the TTP in 2007. Recalling that he had settled in Afghanistan’s Paktika province during Operation Zarb-i-Azb, he detailed his terrorist activities, including attacks on various Pakistan Army checkposts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Nasrullah further said he had been working as an “emir” in the TTP’s defence commission since 2023.
He then detailed a plan he was told of in January 2024, according to which a BLA guide would aid him in crossing the Pak-Afghan border via Spin Boldak town and take him to southern Balochistan. The militant claimed that the plan was made in connivance with BLA Majeed Brigade commander Bashir Zeb. Nasrullah said Indian intelligence agency RAW was “behind all this, which wanted a nexus of the BLA and the TTP, and that bases of the TTP be established” in Khuzdar.
“Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud and Mufti Muzahim said we and our friends, ie RAW, have three objectives in establishing a foothold in Balochistan,” he said. He went on to list them: “Sabotaging CPEC projects, including targeting Chinese citizens; carrying out kidnapping for ransom to play up the matter of enforced disappearances so that intelligence agencies can be defamed; and spreading anarchy and frustration among the people by fomenting terrorist activities in Balochistan.”
Detailing the implementation of the above-mentioned plan made with BLA, Nasrullah said he and his accomplices came across a patrolling party of the Pakistan Army upon reaching near Kalat, at which the BLA guide fled, leaving them behind.
“We tried to flee but were soon arrested,” the militant said. He claimed that Mehsud holds meetings with RAW agents at the Indian embassy in Kabul, which he said were fully supported by the Afghan government.