Twenty-eight people travelling to a wedding in southwest Pakistan were killed today when their vehicle hit a landmine near the country's main natural gas fields.
The blast happened in Dera Bugti district of Baluchistan province. Authorities blamed autonomy-seeking militants for planting the mine.
"This attack was carried out by the same people who fire rockets, carry out bomb blasts and attack security forces," the chief minister of Baluchistan, Jam Mohammad Yousaf, told reporters in the provincial capital, Quetta.
Provincial officials said 26 people died on the spot while two people later died of wounds.
Twenty of the dead were women and children, they said.
Baluch militants have waged a low-level insurgency for greater control over gas and other resources for decades, but have intensified attacks on government installations and infrastructure, including gas pipelines, over the past year.
The wedding party was travelling on a trailer being pulled by a tractor. Militants were known to have planted mines in the area and security forces had been trying to clear them, a provincial spokesman said.
The violence in the province, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, is another pressing security problem for President Pervez Musharraf, whose forces are also battling Islamist militants in tribal areas on the Afghan border to the north of Baluchistan.
There has been no evidence or claim of any cooperation between the al Qaeda-linked Islamist rebels and the Baluch nationalists, analysts say.
Many Pakistanis - alarmed that security forces are battling their own countrymen - have criticised the government's handling of Baluchistan, saying the problem should be tackled through negotiations.
"Dialogue is the best way out," said a Baluch nationalist who is trying to promote peace.
"Both sides have to step down as the fighting does not serve anyone's interest," said the nationalist, who declined to be identified or to speculate on who might have been responsible for Friday's blast.