The killing of two Chinese nationals by the Islamic State in Pakistan's Balochistan province, has sparked an outage on social media, with Chinese netizens demanding that their government send PLA troops to Pakistan to avenge the killings.
The reports about the killing of two Chinese nationals in Balochistan generated a cascade of discussion on Weibo, a Twitter-style Chinese social media platform, with many users calling for revenge, the South China Morning Post has reported.
"We shall start a war against IS, killing them on behalf of the two murdered Chinese," said a user going by the name Zhou Qi Bei Hou.
Chinese officials have yet to directly confirm the deaths, but a spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry said Wednesday that Beijing is investigating whether the pair described in some reports as Chinese language teachers were illegally preaching in Pakistan before they were abducted and killed.
In an earlier press conference, the ministry said it had been told by Pakistan that the pair had "probably died".
"It is time to fight violence with violence," another user, Lingchen99096, said.
More From This Section
Beijing has been restricting such content from going online, but tens of thousands of comments regarding the atrocity remain.
The Dawn had reported that both China and Pakistan are now probing the ISIS claim. An investigation into the IS claim that the Chinese couple had been killed is on.
The IS claim came hours after Inter-Services Public Relations released details of a three-day operation in the Mastung area of Balochistan earlier this month targeting 'IS facilitators', in which security forces had killed 12 "hardcore terrorists, including two suicide bombers".
Two Chinese nationals were kidnapped on May 24 from the Jinnah town area of Quetta,the capital of Balochistan.
Unidentified abductors had forced the two Chinese nationals, a man and a woman, into a vehicle at gunpoint and drove away, The Dawn reported.
The two Chinese nationals were teachers at a private language school in Quetta.Another Chinese national reportedly managed to escape, while a passerby was injured during firing by the abductors.
China has raised its concerns about the safety of its nationals in Quetta because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project. Thousands of Pakistani soldiers have been tasked with providing security for CPEC-related construction. There have been number of violent strikes in past two years in Quetta.