"Seven labourers have been gunned down by unknown armed men ... in Khuda-i-Abadan area of Panjgur town," Senior Superintendent of Police in Panjgur, Syed Fazil Shah told Reuters, adding one other labourer was injured.

Pakistani authorities said Sunday suspected insurgents killed at least seven workers and abducted 20 others at gunpoint in two attacks overnight in the country’s southwestern Balochistan province. The violence occurred in the Panjgur and Musakhail districts of the sparsely populated insurgency-hit province,

The workers were all from the same town in Punjab, which is in Pakistan’s east. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but separatists in Balochistan have often killed workers and others from Punjab to force them to leave the southwest,

Unidentified gunmen stormed a residential compound in southwestern Pakistan late Saturday, killing seven laborers. The attack, the latest in a series of ethnic assaults, took place at night in the country’s restive Balochistan province.