Dozens of militants attacked three army posts in a tribal region that serves as the primary base for Pakistan's Taliban chief, triggering shootouts that left 20 insurgents and three soldiers dead early Thursday, intelligence officials told The Associated Press. In the southwest of the country, a bomb exploded in the toilet of a passenger train on the move from Quetta to Karachi, killing one and wounding 35 others, police official Shamar Ali Magsi said. The Baluch Republican Army, a nationalist group fighting a low-level insurgency for greater autonomy for Baluchistan province and a bigger share of its oil revenues, claimed responsibility for the blast, spokesman Sarboz Baluch said in a phone call to The Associated Press. Deadly attacks have risen sharply across Pakistan in the past two weeks and are being blamed on militants who have vowed a campaign of bombings in retaliation for the military's offensive to oust the Taliban from the northwestern Swat Valley region.
