At least five Chinese workers were killed on Tuesday when a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into their convoy in northern Pakistan, officials said. Their Pakistani driver was also killed in the attack.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
The Chinese laborers were working on the Dasu dam, a hydropower project on the Indus River in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The convoy was moving from Islamabad to Dasu and came under attack around 1 p.m., officials said.
This was the second-deadliest attack on Chinese working on the project, after a previous suicide attack on a convoy in 2021.
Pakistan and China have close economic and strategic ties, and China is estimated to have spent some $62 billion on those projects in Pakistan, mostly to build a transportation corridor through Baluchistan to a new Chinese-operated deepwater port in the Pakistani town of Gwadar.
“This latest attack on Chinese nationals in Pakistan heightens growing fears in Beijing about the bleak future of its tens of billions in investments in the country,” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior director of Eurasian security and prosperity at the New Lines Institute in Washington.
“China has had a front-row seat in witnessing Pakistan’s social, political, economic and security meltdown,” he said. “What is happening in Pakistan, along with the situation in post-U.S. Afghanistan, represents a serious threat to Chinese interests in the broader South and Central Asian regions.”
