Peshawar, Bannu blasts

EDITORIAL:THE STATESMAN
Unfortunate were the incidents on Saturday in which suicide car bombers struck separately in Bannu and Peshawar killing collectively 21 persons and injuring more than 200 persons, most of them critically. The injured were rushed to District Headquarters Hospital, Bannu while in Peshawar to Combined Military Hospital, Fauji Foundation Hospital and the Lady Reading Hospital. In Bannu, the suicide bomber rammed at 7-20am a pick-up van loaded with explosives into the building of Mandan police station located some eight kilometres to the south of the city. At the time of the explosion, about 150 to 200 persons, including the jawans of Frontier Constabulary, were present in the police station. Minutes after the Bannu blast, Qari Hussain, said to be the mastermind of suicide bombings belonging to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, phoned up BBC’s Peshawar office to accept the responsibility for blowing up the police station. He also threatened to soon conduct similar attacks in other cities. Intelligence agencies were still busy focusing on the implications of the TTP threat when a powerful car bomb blast shortly before midday – five hours after the Bannu incident – rocked the busiest part of the shopping district in Peshawar Cantonment. AIG bomb disposal squad Shafqat Khan told media persons that the bomber lobbed a hand grenade on to the road to scare away the crowd in order to take his vehicle, loaded with 100 kgs of explosives, near a seven-storey building opposite the Greens Wedding Hall where several banks have their branches. Eyewitnesses told camera teams that the branch managers had been receiving threatening letters against the presence of women as employees or as customers. The blast destroyed at least 20 cars, some of them brand new parked for sale by the dealers in the neighbouring showroom. Senior minister visited the place and promised to pay Rs300,000 to the affected families per every killed person and Rs100,000 for every injured citizen. Similarly, talking to newsmen the Minister of Information Mian Iftikhar Hussain described the cowardly attack as part of the ongoing war between the forces of good and evil. He said that militants and suicide bombers did not deserve any sympathy from anyone in the world. The entire humanity hated them and resented their misdeeds.
Newly-appointed chief of the Capital City Police DIG Liaquat Ali was not prepared to accept that the devastating blast in the heart of NWFP’s biggest cantonment was the result of a security lapse. When media persons insisted on this being a security lapse, police tried to cover up its inefficiency by hurriedly taking into custody a couple of individuals wearing long flowing Arabic robes. The trained saboteurs would obviously not be naïve enough to loiter about the site of the blast in full public view where members of half a dozen of law enforcing agencies were examining the scene of the explosion with hands on the leash of supposedly sniffer dogs. It is indeed amazing how the suicide bomber managed to take his vehicle almost to the boundary wall of the well-guarded and high security CMH. Every road and lane in the cantonment has prominent signboards that warn the pedestrians and the motorists alike to beware as secret cameras are monitoring their movements. On entry points, police notes down the registration numbers of the cars that enter the Saddar proper and issue a chit to the drivers who return it to the staff on duty on the exit point. Similarly, jawans of army and military police guarding the main cantonment roads do not allow any taxi-cab driver to ply his vehicle unless he has a special sticker issued by the Army House pasted on to his windscreen. Whatever the cause of the blasts in Bannu and Peshawar, the killers of innocent lives should not go scot free.