Gunmen late Tuesday shot dead a senior university professor in Pakistan's insurgency-hit south-western province of Balochistan, police said. Safdar Kiyani, 59, was gunned down near the campus when he was returning to Balochistan University after his routine evening walk in the provincial capital Quetta, senior police officer Qazi Abdul Wajid told AFP.
"The assailants opened fire before he could enter the campus," Wajid said, adding that Kiyani died on his way to hospital. The attack was claimed by a militant group, the Balochistan Liberation Army. "He had been working for the intelligence agencies and we had already warned him," the group's spokesman Beeberg Baluch told reporters in phone calls from an undisclosed location. Kiyani, who was head of the Botany department, had been teaching for more than 20 years, his colleagues said.