The 34-year-old officer was leading the front element of a clearance operation in Gwadar district when a roadside bomb struck, the latest Lahore family to pay for the Balochistan campaign
LAHORE: Major Wajahat Waheed, a Pakistan Army officer killed by an improvised explosive device during a counter-terrorism operation on the Makran coast, was buried in his home city of Lahore on Tuesday with full military honours.
His funeral prayers were offered at Bahria Town, where an army contingent presented a salute to the flag-draped coffin. The governor of Punjab, the Corps Commander Lahore, senior provincial ministers, civil and military officers and a large crowd of residents attended, according to official and local media accounts. The 34-year-old leaves behind his mother, his widow and a young daughter.
His death on October 18 in Shadi Kaur, in the Pasni tehsil of Gwadar district, brings the cost of the Balochistan campaign home to a Lahore neighbourhood more than 1,200 kilometres from where he fell.
Leading from the front
The military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), said security forces had acted on intelligence reports of several hideouts used by militants it describes as “Fitna al-Hindustan”, the state’s term for Baloch separatist groups it says are backed by India. The hideouts, in Shadi Kaur and in Jattakabad in Kalat district, were described as a threat to local residents.
Major Wajahat was heading the lead component of the force sweeping the Shadi Kaur area when the bomb went off, ISPR said. The statement called him “a son of the soil” who “made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty and embraced shahadat”. The military did not disclose his unit, his course or how many other soldiers were with him when the device exploded.
Several hundred kilometres to the north-east, troops in Jattakabad engaged a militant position on the same day. Four militants were killed after an intense exchange of fire, and a large cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives was recovered, according to ISPR. Security sources linked the dead men to attacks on troops and civilians in Kalat, Mangochar and Surab.
ISPR said sanitisation of the Pasni area would continue until any remaining militants were eliminated. Both operations were carried out under Azm-e-Istehkam, the counter-terrorism framework approved by the Federal Apex Committee of the National Action Plan.
Tributes from Islamabad to Peshawar
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered condolences to the family, prayed for the elevation of the officer’s ranks and repeated the government’s pledge to defeat what he called foreign-sponsored terrorism. President Asif Ali Zardari paid tribute to the major and the troops involved and said militant conspiracies would be defeated.
Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir and the interior minister also honoured the officer, saying his sacrifice would strengthen national resolve against terrorism. In Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s adviser on information, Samar Haroon Bilour, called him a model of dedication, courage and patriotism and said caring for the families of fallen soldiers was a shared national responsibility.
Why a coastal tehsil matters
Pasni is a fishing town about 130 kilometres east of Gwadar port, on the coastal belt that carries the Makran Coastal Highway and sits close to the infrastructure linked to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Its scrubland and dry river beds give militants room to plant roadside bombs on routes that patrols must use, which is why clearance operations there are among the most dangerous assignments in the province.
The officer’s death comes at a time of exceptional militant pressure. The Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS) recorded 225 militant attacks nationwide in September 2026, the highest monthly figure in 12 years, and 103 security personnel killed in the same month. Balochistan alone accounted for 131 attacks, up 47% from August, while security forces killed 171 militants in the province during operations, the think tank said.
Attacks nationwide in the first nine months of the year totalled 1,232, a 52% increase on the same period of 2025, according to PICSS.
The military has answered with a steady run of intelligence-based operations. Troops killed 12 militants in a Kalat operation in early September and 19 more in Quetta and Kech later that month, when one soldier was also killed. Those actions followed Operation Shaban, launched in July after a deadly attack on police in Ziarat, which security sources say has inflicted heavy losses on militant networks in both the north and south of the province.
A city that knows the price
For Lahore, the funeral at Bahria Town carried echoes of a long tradition. Last month the city marked the 61st martyrdom anniversary of Major Raja Aziz Bhatti, the Nishan-e-Haider recipient who fell defending Lahore at the BRB Canal in 1965. Six decades on, the city’s sons are more often lost far from home, on desert tracks in Balochistan and mountain roads in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in a war without front lines.
The threat has not stayed on the periphery. Punjab imposed Section 144 across the province in September as terror alerts mounted, and the province’s Counter Terrorism Department said it had carried out 117 intelligence-based operations and arrested 18 suspects in a single reporting period in August. Officials in Lahore say the work done in places like Pasni is part of what keeps attacks out of Punjab’s cities.
Islamabad maintains that the Baloch insurgency receives Indian backing, a charge New Delhi rejects. Analysts have argued that Pakistan should put more of its evidence on the record to win international support for that case.
ISPR said clearance operations in Shadi Kaur were continuing. The family has not spoken publicly, and the military has not said whether any other personnel were wounded in the blast.
For the household he leaves behind, the questions are more personal. A young daughter will grow up with a flag and a citation instead of a father, a cost that no monthly casualty count fully captures.
Leave a Reply