Two policemen, a suspected militant and a woman bystander were killed in a clash in the restive southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Monday, police said.

The shootings took place in Kerani, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Quetta, when police stopped two suspected militants on a motorcycle, senior police official Zahoor Afridi told AFP.

Afghan negotiators said Thursday their next round of talks with the Taliban would focus in detail on ways to end bloodshed in the country, wracked by nearly 40 years of war.

Government representatives struck a positive note after returning from their first face-to-face talks with militant commanders held on Tuesday in Pakistan aimed at ending the Taliban's 13-year insurgency.

Gunmen on Monday shot dead two Shiite brothers and a policeman at a passport office in the Pakistani city of Quetta, officials said, the latest sectarian attack to strike the country's restive southwest.

The brothers, who belonged to the Hazara ethnic group that is predominantly Shiite and easily recognized by their Central Asian features, were entering the city's passport office along with their parents when the waiting gunmen opened fire.

Two assailants on a motorcycle Wednesday shot dead three welders at a shop in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, in what police said was an ethnically motivated attack.

The city is the capital of Baluchistan province, home to a long-running nationalist insurgency aimed at seeking greater control over the province's rich oil, gas and mineral resources.

Gunmen killed five people after storming  two tea shops belonging to the Hazara Shiite Muslim community in Pakistan's southwestern city of Quetta on Sunday, police said.

"Two gunmen, one each, stormed two tea shops belonging to the Shiite (ethnic minority) Hazara community in the Meezan Chowk neighborhood of the city and started indiscriminate firing," local police official Muhammad Tariq told AFP.

At least four people were killed and eight others were wounded on Monday when sectarian clashes broke out in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, police said.

"Three members of the Shiite Hazara tribe were killed by the unknown gunmen, while a Sunni man died in the wake of the firing by protesting Hazara youth," city police chief Abdul Razzak Cheema told AFP.

At least 11 people were killed and 30 injured in a series of attacks in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta Thursday, including a suicide bombing at a rally by a leading religious political party.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F) party was leaving a rally in the capital of Pakistan's restive Baluchistan province -- where he had addressed thousands of people -- when his car was targeted by a suicide bomber, officials said.

A huge roadside bomb explosion in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province wounded at least seven people on Saturday, security officials said.

Planted in a car parked by the side of the road, the bomb went off in a suburb of the city of Quetta as police officer's vehicle was passing. Officials said it was unclear whether he was intended the target.

Militants lobbed grenades at two small businesses and a private school in three separate attacks in Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least five people and wounding 12, officials said.

The first two incidents, which police said were ethnically motivated, took place in the southwest where a separatist insurgency is raging. They killed four people and wounded 11.

Pakistani paramilitary forces Sunday killed more than 10 separatist rebels in the violence-stricken southwestern province of Baluchistan as part of a fresh operation to quell a long-running insurgency, officials said.

The operation in Dera Bugti district's Gandyari town, 250 kilometers (150 miles) southeast of the capital Quetta, came just three days after troops killed 30 militants in the same area.