Claim: A video on social media shows hostages taken by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) after the militant group hijacked the Jaffar Express in Balochistan.
Fact: The claim is misleading because the video is not from March 2025. It was available on the internet as early as December 2024 and is not related to the hijacking of the Jaffar Express.
On 11 March 2025, an X (formerly Twitter) posted a video (archive) with the caption,
بریکنگ نیوز ؛
مبینہ طور پر یہ وہ یرغمالی ہیں جنہیں بی ایل اے اپنے ساتھ لے گئی
Translation: [Breaking News ;
These are the hostages allegedly taken by the BLA.]
Jaffar Express Attack
On 11 March 2025, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist militant group, attacked and seized the Peshawar-bound train Jaffar Express near Quetta. According to Controller Railways Muhammad Kashif, the train, which consisted of nine coaches, was transporting approximately 450 passengers from Quetta in Balochistan to Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, passing through Punjab province along the way, reported Dawn.
The BLA claimed responsibility for the attack, alleging that it held “214” people hostages, including civilians as well as military personnel and killed 30 military personnel. The group also warned of retaliation if security forces launched an operation. The Pakistan Army said that it killed 33 attackers during the rescue operations carried out to release the hostages, while another “21 civilian hostages and four military personnel were killed.” Security forces rescued 300 passengers, according to the BBC.
At present, the whereabouts of the remaining hostages remain unknown and Soch Fact Check could not independently verify the exact death toll. Still, at this point, it is difficult to verify the death toll on both sides, as the BLA has often exaggerated numbers and the information from security officials is also limited.
Train Route and Attack Location
Passenger trains and bridges in the Bolan terrain have been attacked many times over the years. The railway route of the Quetta-Peshawar journey spans over 1,600 kilometers and takes more than 30 hours, with more than 30 stops.
Initially, it was reported that the incident took place near Mashkaf Tunnel. However, a day later the BLA’s media wing, Hakkal, released footage of the hijacking, which appeared on X here (archive) and was published by international media outlets, including Al Jazeera and The Guardian. On 14 March, the military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), held a press conference and shared footage of the operation. Soch Fact Check found that the location in both of these videos does not match that of Mashkaf Tunnel.
Our investigation revealed that the location was misreported and the incident did not take place near Mashkaf Tunnels or at Mashkaf. The actual location of the attacks in the video is at 29.648247968285144, 67.58215436031169, 13 kilometers northwest of the Mashkaf Railway Tunnel and well before the Pehro Kunri Station in Dhadar, in the Kachhi District of Balochistan.
The BLA’s Recent Activity
Insurgency has gripped the marginalised southwestern province of Pakistan since the 1950s. Baloch nationalists allege that neglect and exploitation of Balochistan’s natural resources by the Pakistani state has triggered the rise in insurgent movements.
Recently, Balochistan has witnessed a surge in terrorist attacks as compared to the last few years. In January 2025, the Islamabad-based think tank Pak Institute of Peace Studies (PIPS) warned in a security report that the situation in Balochistan had become “alarming.” In 2024, the province experienced a sharp rise in terrorist attacks and casualties, with an 84% increase in attacks compared to the previous year, the report noted. It added that a total of 202 incidents were recorded, resulting in 322 deaths and 534 injuries. Notably, attacks carried out by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) surged by a staggering 119% and accounted for 171 attacks, according to the same report.
The deadliest was the complex attack in Mach, Balochistan, which began with a volley of rockets fired from the mountains on the night of 29 January 2024. The insurgents then attacked the police station, railway station and central jail in Mach, where the exchange of fire lasted for about 12 hours. The responsibility of this attack was later claimed by the Majeed Brigade, the armed wing of the BLA.
The separatist militant group then targeted the railways in August 2024, when they carried out a blast destroying a key railway bridge between Kolpur and Mach. On the same day, they also killed 23 people in a separate attack on the national highway after checking their IDs, most of whom were from Punjab. Following the attack, Pakistan Railways suspended train services between Quetta and Peshawar for six weeks, which later resumed in October 2024.
Weeks later, in November 2024, a suicide blast at Quetta Railway Station killed at least 26 people and injured another 62, signalling an escalation in security threats within the region.
Fact or Fiction?
To investigate the claim, Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search on the video’s keyframes on Google Lens. The results led to a Facebook post published on 10 December 2024. The caption of the post only mentioned one word:
پاراچنار
#parachinar#kurrum
Another result led to an Instagram post also published on 10 December 2024. The post featured the same video being fact-checked, and its Urdu caption read:
پاراچنار ہزاروں کی تعداد میں تکفیری دہشت اور ملک دشمن طالبان ایک بار پھر سے پاراچنار کی طرف روانہ
پاراچنار کے شیعہ کے خلاف جہاد کے لئے
وہ پوچھنا یہ تھا کہ ریاست ، حفاظتی سیکیورٹی ادارے , انٹلیجنس ایجنسیاں کہا ہے ؟؟؟
یا پھر پاکستان کو بھی شام بنانے کی تیاریاں
#پاراچنار #شام #Syrian #Parachinar #parachinarupdate #genocide
Translation: “[Parachinar thousands of non-believer terrorists and anti-national Taliban once again set off towards Parachinar, for jihad against the Shiites of Parachinar.
The question to ask is, where are the state, security agencies, and intelligence agencies???
Or is Pakistan being prepared to be made into another Syria too?]”
Both of these posts refer to the deadly attack in November 2024 when gunmen opened fire on convoys carrying Shia pilgrims in the Kurram district. The attack killed 52 people, including women and children. In December 2024, it was reported that more than 130 people had been killed in these deadly attacks. Pakistan security forces launched an operation in the northwest Kurram district to clear the area of any militants in January 2025.
However, an X account KDR News posted the same video on 11 December 2024. The post’s caption, when translated into English, reads, “According to reports, hundreds of #TTP have entered the Lakki Marwat, Tang and Kalachi areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”
TTP refers to the banned military outfit Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Since the TTP ended the ceasefire with Pakistan in 2022, the country has witnessed a sharp increase in attacks targeting security forces. In December 2024, Pakistan’s security forces killed 43 militants in different operations conducted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan. According to reports, six terrorists were killed in the Lakki Marwat district between the nights of December 12 and 13. In a separate operation, five terrorists were killed in Lakki Marwat, the ISPR said in a press release on 4 December 2024. The press release mentions the word khwarij – a term notified in July 2024 by the Pakistani government for the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
It is important to note that according to the BBC, which cited eyewitness accounts, as well as the footage released by the BLA and ISPR, passengers were captured and separated into smaller groups along the train’s route. They were held hostage at the same location where the train was hijacked, and the surrounding landscape, as seen in the verified footage, appears different from the one we see in the video in the claim.
While Soch Fact Check traced the video back to two separate incidents in December 2024, we could not independently verify the exact context of the footage and whether it was from Pakistan or not. However, since the video was available online before the hijacking of the train in Balochistan, we can confirm that it is unrelated to the hijacking of the Jaffar Express and does not show hostages being taken by the BLA.
Virality
On X, the video received 260.6K views, 2,800 comments and 759 reposts. The archived versions can be seen here and here.
The video was also linked to train hijacking here, here and here on Facebook and here on YouTube.
Conclusion: A video claiming to show hostages taken by the BLA is not from the recent train hijacking incident in Balochistan. The video was available online as early as December 2024 and is unrelated to the train attack.
Background image in cover photo: Dawn
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