Rocket kills 2 at Pakistani market

Rockets fired by suspected insurgents Saturday killed two people and wounded 20 others in Pakistan’s troubled southwestern city of Quetta, police and hospital officials said. One rocket which landed at a busy market killed a 17-year-old boy and wounded 18 others, police said. One of the injured died later in hospital. “A boy was killed on the spot and one of the wounded, a man, died at hospital,” senior police official Mohammad Zubair told AFP. A second rocket landed about a kilometer (mile) away in a Christian neighborhood and wounded three family members. Hospital official Rasheed Jamali confirmed the casualties. Zubair said nobody had immediately claimed responsibility for firing the rockets but in the past separatists have carried out similar attacks. Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province of which Quetta is the capital, suffers from Islamist militancy linked to the Taliban, sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and a separatist insurgency. Hundreds of people have been killed since separatist Baluch rebels rose up in 2004, demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from oil, gas and mineral resources in the region.