School bus blast in Pakistan kills at least five people

A school bus explosion in Pakistan's Balochistan region has killed at least five people and injured dozens.

The bus was carrying around 40 school children when it exploded at about 07:40 local time (02:40 GMT) just outside the remote town of Khuzdar, police told the BBC.

Three of the five people killed are children, police said. Pictures circulating on social media show the charred wreckage of a large bus, with backpacks scattered around it.

No group has claimed responsibility for the incident so far, but Balochistan, a turbulent province in the country's south west, has long been plagued by a long-standing insurgency and human rights violations.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi condemned the incident as "sheer barbarism", calling the attackers "beasts who target children" in an attempt to destabilise the country.

The country's military has accused neighbouring India and its proxies in Balochistan of orchestrating the explosion, though there is no evidence of this.

Pakistan and India are just emerging from a deadly two-week conflict sparked by a militant attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Pakistan denied involvement in those attacks, but India followed up with a series of strikes on sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Earlier in March, some 21 civilians and four military personnel were killed during a train siege in Balochistan's remote Sibi district.

That attack was carried out by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist group that has waged a decades-long insurgency to gain independence.

Pakistani authorities, as well as several Western countries, including the UK and US, have designated the BLA as a terrorist organisation.

The country's military has also previously accused it of being an "Indian proxy" - a claim that the BLA has rejected.

But Baloch activists have also accused Pakistan's security forces of its own atrocities.

They say thousands of ethnic Baloch people have been disappeared by Pakistan's security forces in the last two decades - allegedly detained without due legal process, or abducted, tortured and killed in operations against a decades-old separatist insurgency.