By IANS
Islamabad : Pakistan and China are working together to finalise the setting up of a Joint Task Force (JTF) to ensure security for Chinese nationals working in the country.
The Joint Task Force is expected to take shape within a week and will be formalised later with a bilateral memorandum of understanding (MOU), The News said quoting sources in the foreign office.
The arrangement is in response to frequent attacks on Chinese in Pakistan, causing strains on bilateral ties between the two long-time allies.
"It is a vital relation for Pakistan but it appears that somebody wants to damage it," foreign office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam said after a blast Wednesday in the industrial town of Hub, 25 km north of Karachi.
A Chinese-run massage parlour in Islamabad was attacked recently by students and militants from Lal Masjid. Nine people, including Chinese women and children, were taken hostage.
The army stormed the mosque in the heart of the capital earlier this month and over 100 people, including militants and soldiers, were killed in the operation.
Interior ministry spokesperson Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema said the government was in close touch with the Chinese mission here on the question of security of its nationals.
The mission, he claimed, had expressed satisfaction over the security arrangements provided to its nationals.
Around 5,000 Chinese live and work in Pakistan. Most of them are engaged in several Beijing-funded development and engineering projects, many of which are opposed by various insurgent groups.
"The Chinese are being killed in the north because their killing hurts the government in Islamabad the most," Daily Times observed Friday in an editorial.
Linking the attacks to the training of Uighours – Chinese Muslim rebels in camps in Pakistan – the editorial said: "Pakistanis universally admire China as their friend of all seasons, but there remains an unexpressed plaint among the Islamist elements in Pakistan about the suppression of the Islamist rebels in China's western province of Xinjiang. Some of these rebels have been found among the 'Taliban' in the tribal areas.
"As the Chinese deaths increase, the Pakistan-China equation comes under pressure and the Chinese enterprise – now increasingly in the private sector – is beginning to fight shy of coming to projects in Pakistan," the newspaper said.
A suicide attack aimed at Chinese workers in south-western Balochistan province Thursday, which killed at least 29 Pakistanis, was the deadliest in a series of such incidents.
A May 2004 car bomb blamed on the insurgents killed three Chinese engineers, who were involved in developing a Beijing-funded deep sea port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. In February 2006 three more Chinese engineers were shot dead in the same region allegedly by Baloch 'nationalists' fighting for autonomy and opposed to the government in Islamabad.
In 2004, Taliban militant Abdullah Mehsud abducted two Chinese engineers at the Gomal Zam Dam in South Waziristan. After all negotiations failed, the kidnappers' hideout was stormed, which resulted in the death of one of the engineers.