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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Who was behind the Lahore bombings |
| 2005-09-26 |
| The police have arrested two men and a couple in connection with the September 22 âbicycleâ bomb explosions in Lahore, which killed seven and wounded many. It is thought these persons âmay lead the police to the bombersâ. We hope so. But the bomb explosions raise several issues. First, two men were arrested in Sadiqabad in southern Punjab with explosives and other bomb-making material on Friday night. On their information, a man and a woman were arrested from Lahore. The couple, originally from Jacobabad in Sindh, had been living in a rented house near Lahoreâs Data Darbar shrine. Police say they found some âimportantâ telephone numbers on them and seized Rs 200,000 in cash. The police also said the face of the husband resembled the witnessesâ description of the suspect in the second blast. Are the police onto something? A video of the man caught from Data Darbar was shown to the wounded victims of the second blast but no one could recognise him. After that the police spread its net throughout Punjab and arrested several others, including members of some âmilitant groupsâ. Around 35 people were arrested from Lahore, some of them activists of the âmilitant groupsâ. The police arrested, for good measure, 30 beggars, who were later released. A senior police officer revealed that the two men arrested from Sadiqabad were very poor and unemployed and could have been paid by India to âcreate mischief in Pakistan because of its recognition of Israelâ. He also said that religious terrorists did not in principle (sic!) attack the âcommon publicâ indiscriminately and that this attack could only have been the work of some âforeign handâ. This is nonsense. The âforeign handâ theory should be discarded promptly. In all the cases where we employed it starting 2003 - when massacres of the âcommon publicâ took place in Quetta and Karachi â it was proved wrong. Unfortunately, the more it is used and refuted the more it remains handy for incompetent or secretive government officials and politicians. As for its application to the Lahore blasts, the âseniorâ police official perhaps forgot that in the mid-1990s the âcommon publicâ was decimated at the lower courts in Lahore by a âbicycle bombâ planted by a religious terrorist settling sectarian scores. The massacre of the Hazaras in Quetta was officially assigned to the âIndian consulatesâ in Afghanistan despite the fact that the Hazaras kept pointing to the real culprits, which were located inside Pakistan and were well known. There are many candidates for the blasts, most probably all of them Pakistani. (There is ample ground for India to create mischief by fishing in the troubled waters here, but these days India has little cause to stir the pot.) If India is riled to such an extent by Pakistanâs opening of channels with Israel, which it is not, there is much more public anger in all sorts of quarters inside Pakistan to attract our suspicion. The religious parties and all the unaffiliated mullahs are calling down curses on the government for talking to Israel. Our parliament has rung to the angry speeches delivered by the combined opposition, and articles about it have been written in intemperate language in the newspapers. There is also Osama Bin Ladenâs army in Waziristan, which kills the innocent âcommon publicâ as a part of its terrorist strategy. Last week ANP leader Lateef Afridi said on TV that Al Qaeda commander, Qari Tahir Yuldashev, had held a large gathering in the wilds of North Waziristan, which was attended by some members of the NWFP cabinet. Osamaâs cause is also directed at Israel. Of course, there is so much general resentment that the finger might point not just at the extremist religious groups but at Sindhi or Baloch sub-nationalists as well. The Sindhis are up in arms against the proposed Kalabagh Dam while the Baloch are actually running a so-called liberation army that has been going around attacking pipelines and installations. They have just rejected the Mushahid Hussain Parliamentary Committee on Balochistan even though it recommended that the plan to build new cantonments in Balochistan be laid aside. There is also a very intense reaction against the recent generally âun-transparentâ local bodies polls in the provinces, with the result that there is enough anger around to convince someone to âshake upâ the Punjab a bit. Both the Punjab governor and chief minister have been targeted recently with small homemade explosive devices discovered by the police along the routes to be taken by the two VIPs. Those could have been the two warning shots across the bow before the September 22 âbicycleâ blasts. Whatever the cause, it wonât be too long before we know who is behind it and why. Meanwhile, we should be prepared for the worst. The police have traditionally been shown to be wiser after the event since they are not equipped to stop terrorist attacks in the first place. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |