1 dead in grenade attack on a store selling national flags ahead of Pakistan’s Independence Day

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Suspected militants riding on a motorcycle hurled a hand grenade at a store selling Pakistani national flags in the restive southwestern Baluchistan province on Tuesday, killing at least one person and wounding six others ahead of Pakistan’s 77th independence day.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack in the Liaquat Bazar in Quetta, the provincial capital.

Wasim Baig, a spokesman at a government hospital, said they received six injured people and the body of a man after the blast.

The attack came days after a separatist group in Baluchistan asked shop owners not to sell Pakistan’s national flags. The Baluch Liberation Army also warned people not to celebrate Pakistan’s Independence Day on Thursday, which commemorates Aug. 14, 1947, when Pakistan gained independence from British colonial rule.

Separatists have been carrying out a long-running insurgency in Baluchistan, demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad.

Although Pakistan says it has quelled the insurgency in Baluchistan, violence has increased in recent months.

Baluchistan also shares a long border with neighboring Afghanistan from where officials say Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups often launch cross-border attacks on security forces, causing troops casualties.

In the latest such attack on Tuesday, a group of militants attacked security forces in South Waziristan, a district in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, security officials said. There was no immediate comment from the government or military about the attack in the former Taliban stronghold.

In recent years Pakistan has seen a surge in militant attacks that were often claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a separate group from