3 dead in grenade attacks on a store selling national flags ahead of Pakistan's Independence Day

QUETTA, Pakistan — Suspected militants hurled hand grenades at a house and a store selling Pakistani national flags in the restive southwestern Baluchistan province on Tuesday, killing three people and wounding six others ahead of Pakistan’s 77th independence day.

The separatist Baluch Liberation Army group claimed responsibility for the attacks in the provincial capital of Quetta, days after the group asked shop owners not to sell the flags. It also warned people not to celebrate the holiday on Wednesday, marking the Aug. 14, 1947, date of Pakistan’s independence from British colonial rule.

Wasim Baig, a spokesperson at a government hospital, said the facility had received six injured people and three bodies following the attacks.

Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Asim Munir vowed to defeat militancy in a televised speech at an event that took place at a military academy in the country's northeast on the eve of Independence Day.

Munir sought cooperation from neighboring Afghanistan against the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that operates from Afghan soil and that has stepped up attacks across the border in the northwest.

The group also operates in southwestern Baluchistan alongside the long-running insurgency in that region, which also shares a border with Afghanistan.

In the latest violence in the northwest, a group of militants killed four security forces in South Waziristan, a district in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the military said. In a statement, it said troops returned fire, killing six insurgents.