Separatist militants hijacked a train carrying more than 400 people in an isolated mountainous area of southwestern Pakistan on Tuesday.

       A militant group that claimed responsibility for the attack said it was holding scores of security personnel who had been on the train, and it threatened to kill them if the Pakistani government did not agree to a prisoner exchange.

       The fate of the rest of the passengers was not immediately clear, though security officials said that at least 104 of them, mostly women and children, had been rescued, and that 17 injured passengers had been taken to the hospital for treatment.

       The militants, Baloch ethnic fighters, forced the train to stop in the Bolan district of Balochistan Province after opening fire on it, according to railway and police officials.

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       The train was traveling from Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. It was scheduled to pass through several cities, including Lahore and Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. But it became stranded inside a tunnel about 100 miles from Quetta as it came under attack, and the driver was killed, according to the local authorities.

       Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan provincial government, said the authorities had initially struggled to reach the site of the ambush because of the challenging terrain.

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