Pakistan announced a ban on five militant groups operating in the restive southwest and froze their assets yesterday, the country’s interior minister Rehman Malik said.

Violence has surged this year in southwestern Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan and Iran and is rife with separatist unrest as well as Islamist militancy and sectarian violence.

"Today five of them have been proscribed. They will not be allowed to undertake any activity, their offices will be closed and action will be taken against their office bearers," Malik told reporters.

"Their bank accounts have also been seized," said Malik, speaking in Quetta, the main town of Baluchistan, where a suicide bomber killed 59 people on Friday at a Shia Muslim rally.