Five Chinese citizens were killed on Tuesday when a suicide bomber targeted their vehicle in northwest Pakistan, news agency AFP said. “Five Chinese and their local driver were killed in the attack,” Muhammad Ali Gandapur, a senior police official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, was quoted as saying by the news agency.

A total of six people, including the driver, have died in the terror attack.

The suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into a convoy of engineers, according to a report by news agency Reuters.

The engineers, mostly foreign nationals, were travelling from a hydroelectric dam construction site towards the capital Islamabad when the bombing happened near Besham city.

Chinese citizens are often targeted by militants in Pakistan, where Beijing has huge investments under its “Belt and Road” initiative which has seen it ink two $2 trillion in contracts around the world.

In 2021 a bus carrying engineers to a construction site near a dam in northwest Pakistan was hit by a bomb, killing 13 people including nine Chinese workers.