Gunmen armed with automatic weapons, grenades and wearing suicide vests attacked two military airbases in southwestern Pakistan early Friday, leaving eight militants dead after Pakistan security forces opened fire, officials said.

Gunmen armed with automatic weapons, grenades and wearing suicide vests attacked two military airbases in southwestern Pakistan early Friday, leaving eight militants dead after Pakistan security forces opened fire, officials said.

Sarfaraz Bugti, the home minister of insurgency-hit Baluchistan province, said that militants had tried to storm the Samungli airbase, used by Pakistan's Air Force, and Khalid military airbase, both in the provincial capital Quetta, but had failed to penetrate either perimeter.

"The operation at both the bases is over and eight militants have been killed, five at Samungli and three others at Khalid airbase," Colonel Maqbool Ahmed, in charge of the operation, told AFP.

"The gun fights with militants which started overnight around 10.00pm continued till 7.30am, in which seven security forces personnel were also wounded," he added.

The targets of the attacks were the airbases, which are situated 12 kilometers apart in Quetta, he added.

Ahmed said that attackers wearing suicide bombs arrived in a Suzuki pickup at the rear of the perimeter of Samungli base adjacent to houses and markets and made a hole in the wall.

"When security forces engaged the attackers and fired bullets, they blew themselves up," he said.

Ahmed said all five men appeared to be of Central Asian or Uzbek origin.
At Khalid base three attackers were killed, two of them carried out suicide bombings," the colonel said, adding that two suspected militants were also arrested alive, one of them wounded.

A senior military official said rockets were fired at Samungli airbase, with two landing inside the perimeter fence. He said no damage was caused.

Quetta city's police chief Abdul Razzaq Cheema told AFP that militants first launched an attack on Samungli airbase before targeting Khalid military airbase around an hour later. Police had defused four bombs near the outer wall of Khalid airbase, he said.