Bomb Kills at Least Two Pakistani Oil Workers

A bomb attack on Thursday killed at least two Pakistani oil workers in a remote town in the country's troubled southwest that borders Afghanistan and Iran, police and doctors said.

The blast hit a convoy of Pakistan's government-run Oil and Gas Development Company (OGDCL) in the mineral rich province of Baluchistan, where rebels are fighting for autonomy and demanding a greater share of natural resources.

"We received two dead bodies and seven injured from the blast site," Siddiq Ahmed, a doctor told Agence France Presse by telephone from the local district hospital in the town of Jafarabad, where the attack took place.

Police said the bomb was fixed to a motorbike and parked on the roadside about 272 kilometers southeast of the provincial capital Quetta.

"It was a remote-controlled device which hit the oil and gas officials' vehicle," Mohammed Tariq, a senior police official, told AFP.

Baluchistan is riven by Islamist militancy, sectarian violence between majority Sunnis and minority Shiite Muslims and a separatist insurgency.

Baluch rebels rose up in 2004 demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region's wealth of natural resources. Hundreds of people have since died.

Separately a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a vehicle of a military contractor in Kotkai village of the troubled South Waziristan tribal district bordering Afghanistan on Thursday, security officials said.