Dead or alive? Surviving Pakistan’s 28-hour train hijack in an engine | Armed Groups

Quetta, Pakistan — On the cold morning of March 11, Saad Qamar wore his white and blue uniform, said goodbye to his parents and left his home at 7:30am (06:30 GMT) for the Pakistan Railways loco-shed half a kilometre away.

The 31-year-old assistant train driver signed a duty form before examining the engine he was going to attach to the Peshawar-bound Jaffar Express for its journey of 1,600km (994 miles) from Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta to Peshawar in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

It was an ordinary day. The train left with Qamar, the main driver Amjad Yasin, and more than 400 passengers on board — just as it always did.

They had crossed four stations through the rugged mountains of the Bolan range when he heard a powerful explosion hitting the locomotive from below and rattling him and the driver.

It was 12:55pm (07:55 GMT), and the drivers knew, instinctively, that they were under attack. The Jaffar Express had been targeted by armed groups earlier too, including in January 2023 when it was hit by a bomb, injuring several passengers and overturning three carriages of the train. “The driver [Yasin] applied the emergency brake,” Qamar recalls. The train was running at 40km/h (25mph) at the time.

Over the following two days, the Jaffar Express would make headlines not just in Pakistan but across the world, as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), an armed group, claimed responsibility for the attack, and held the passengers hostage. A deadly siege by Pakistan’s armed forces followed as they tried to free passengers amid gun battles with the BLA fighters.

Eventually, more than 300 passengers were rescued, and the army said it had killed 33 fighters, including suicide bombers. According to the Pakistan Armed Forces’ media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), 21 army soldiers and 10 civilians were killed in the country’s deadliest train hijack.

But more than three weeks later, the memories and horrors of those hours still haunt Qamar.

Trying to save his life

As the train halted after the attack, Qamar said he knew his first job was to place wooden pieces beneath the wheels to stop it from rolling ahead.

“When I stepped out and managed to place one wooden shoe, intense firing started,” he recalled, sitting inside his three-room official railways-sponsored residence in Quetta. “Some bullets hit the wheels near me. My driver asked me to climb inside the engine to save my life, and we locked the doors of the locomotive.”

According to other witnesses, the attackers targeted the train with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). They started offboarding passengers and separating them based on their ethnicities after checking their identity cards.

Qamar managed to inform a nearby railway station about the attack using a wireless communication system available on the train. However, the connection was lost after the driver switched off the engine to avoid the risk of fire; diesel was leaking from cans full of fuel after bullets had pierced them.

“We were not able to communicate with our family and friends because it was a no-signal area,” he said, referring to mobile phones.

Fear of certain death

Qamar, the eldest among his four siblings, was eventually rescued on March 12 at 4:30pm by the commandoes of the Special Services Group (SSG), who moved him and 135 other rescued passengers to Quetta.

By that point, he had spent 28 hours at the site of the attack, almost all of it inside the engine.

The month of Ramadan was ongoing, and Qamar was fasting. “I had food which my mother gave me, but I broke my fast at dusk with a sip of water and I again kept my fast the next morning with another sip of water because at that time I thought of nothing except praying to God,” he said.

But he was not the only one scared for his life.

With the military imposing a communications blackout in the region, rumours spread fast and wild across Pakistan — including that the attackers had killed the driver and the assistant driver, Qamar.

Until the evening of March 11, Qamar’s father, Ghulam Sabir, was unaware of the attack. He was unwell, and the family did not want to worry the 67-year-old.

“I sensed that something bad had happened because my younger brother and younger son were constantly gossiping with tense faces, and the entire environment of the Railway Colony was not normal,” Sabir, who had also worked as a train driver for Pakistan Railways for 40 years, told Al Jazeera.

“When I returned from the evening prayer, I received a call from a friend who lives in Sibi [a small city south of Quetta], who first asked, ‘How is your son Saad?’ because the Jaffar Express had been attacked and hijacked near Paneer Railway Station.”

Sabir, who retired from the railways in 2019, rushed to the railway control room in Quetta for more information about his son. But no one had firm details. Some officials said Qamar was likely dead, others that he had possibly been taken hostage.

The father stayed in the control room, waiting for any update. It was during the iftar meal the following day that confirmed news came through.

Qamar was alive.

“Other drivers and staff members hugged me with tears in their eyes,” he recalled.

‘Perform your duty’

Pakistan has one of the world’s oldest railway systems, which was introduced during British colonial rule in the 18th century to transport weapons and other military equipment close to its northwestern and southwestern borders with Afghanistan.

Trains are an affordable means of transport for the majority of Pakistan’s 244 million people and are often packed with passengers. That also makes them easy targets for armed groups looking to stir up attention.

Before this, ethnic Baloch separatist groups carried out multiple attacks on passenger trains, stations, railway tracks and bridges in the volatile Balochistan province. The BLA, which is seeking independence for Pakistan’s largest but least developed province and claimed responsibility for the March 11 ambush, had earlier attacked a crowded railway station in November, killing more than 30 people.

Yet the latest attack was the deadliest — and most audacious — in Pakistan’s history.

It was also the first time that Qamar, in his five years with the railways, had found himself in the middle of an attack. When he returned home, his mother tried to convince him to quit the job, but his father pressed him to stay on.

“Being an assistant driver or driver, we always try to provide timely and safe travel to the passengers because we are the leaders of the passenger trains and responsible for hundreds of lives who are sitting behind us and trusting without even knowing us,” Qamar said.

Sabir, his father, who witnessed three train attacks during his career, said: “I told my son to perform his duty with bravery even after this train hijack.”

On March 28, Pakistan restarted the train service connecting Balochistan to the rest of the country, after it had been suspended following the attack.

On Thursday, April 3, Qamar will be back at work for the first time since the Jaffar Express hijack, on the same train, wearing his trusted white and blue uniform.