Flames rise after a bomb blast at the Sereena Hotel in Quetta, Pakistan, April 21, 2021.
Mazhar Chandio | Anadolu Agency Getty Images
A car bomb exploded late Wednesday, breaking into the parking lot of a luxury hotel in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, killing four and injuring 11, officials said.
China’s ambassador to Pakistan was staying at the hotel, but was not there when the bomb exploded, Pakistan’s interior minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, said.
Provincial Interior Minister Ziaullah Lango said the envoy is fine.
“An explosion shook the parking area of the Serena Hotel,” police official Nasir Malik, who said 11 people were injured, told Reuters. An official at a local civilian hospital, Waseem Baig, said four people had died and “several others were in critical condition.”
“A car full of explosives exploded in the hotel,” Ahmad told ARY News TV.
The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the bombing.
“It was a suicide attack in which our suicide bomber used his car full of explosives in the hotel,” a spokesman for the militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) wrote in a message to a Reuters reporter.
Chinese Ambassador Nong Rong met earlier this day with Provincial Chief Minister Jam Kamal in the city, according to a tweet from provincial government spokesman Liaquat Shahwani.
Lango told reporters, “I just met him. He is very moved,” adding that the envoy would complete his visit to Quetta on Thursday.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
The well-fortified hotel is located next to the Iranian Consulate and the provincial parliament building. Quetta is the capital of the mineral-rich southwestern province of Balochistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, which has long been the scene of a low-level insurgency by local nationalists who want more regional resources.
The province is hosting the new expanded port of Gwadar, which is key to a planned $ 65 billion investment in the economic corridor of the China Belt and Road Initiative.
It was unclear whether the envoy or members of his delegation were the target of the attack, but Chinese citizens and their interests in the region were attacked before Taliban militants and nationalist insurgents.