Five Chinese nationals and their Pakistani driver were killed today in suicide attack which their vehicle was aiming for, to the northwest Pakistanthe police announced.

“Five Chinese and their local driver were killed in the attack,” which took place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Muhammad Ali Gadapour, a senior local police official, told AFP.

The Chinese had departed from the Dasu hydroelectric dam, the construction of which is being carried out in part by Chinese personnel, and came under attack when they were near the town of Besam, the same source said.

In July 2021, 9 Chinese were killed in an attack on a car carrying engineers, surveyors and maintenance engineers, who were working on the construction of this dam.

The safety of Chinese workers on various infrastructure projects in Pakistan has long been a concern for Beijing, which has invested billions of dollars in the country in recent years.

Meanwhile, Pakistani officials said earlier today that militants attacked a Pakistani naval base, killing at least one paramilitary, while security forces killed all five attackers of the attack, returning fire.

The attack, which took place yesterday, Monday, at the Turbat base in southwestern Pakistan was the second attack by Baloch militants on a military installation in recent days.

“We have prevented a huge loss,” the office of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Sebkhaz Sharif said in a statement.

A spokesman for the Pakistan Navy said that and the five attackers were killed when they tried to storm the base.

A paramilitary was also killed, according to a statement from the Pakistani armed forces.

The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), the most prominent of several separatist groups in Balochistan, claimed responsibility for this attack.

The BLA has previously been involved in attacks on Pakistani and Chinese interests in this region and elsewhere.

China has invested heavily in the mineral-rich southwestern province of Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, including in the development of the Gwadar port, despite decades of separatist activity in the region.

The naval base is important to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which includes road and energy projects and is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt One Road” Initiative.

Last week Pakistani security forces announced that they had repelled an IED and gunfire attack by BLA militants on a compound inside Gwadar that killed two soldiers and eight attackers.