QUETTA, Pakistan — At least 23 people were killed in two separate bomb blasts in Pakistan's insurgency-plagued southwest on Saturday, officials said.
Twelve female students were killed in the first blast that hit a university bus in the Baluchistan provincial capital Quetta, a security official told AFP. Eleven others died when a bomb exploded in the emergency ward of the city's Bolan Medical Complex where the wounded were rushed, he said.
A senior Pakistani police officer says gunmen have taken over parts of a hospital in a southwestern Pakistan.
Fayaz Sumbal, the head of police operations in Quetta, says armed men captured different sections of the hospital complex Saturday and were positioned on rooftops.
He says Frontier Corps troops, and police commandos have been called in.
An Associated Press reporter on the scene could hear intermittent gunfire as security officials took up positions around the building.
The attack happened after two bomb blasts in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, including one at the hospital.
Earlier that day in a different town in the same province, militants destroyed a historic house associated with the country's founder, shooting dead a guard.
The province is home to Islamic militant movements as well as an ethnic nationalist insurgency.
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