Miss Alone
Prime VIP
The incident
A suicide bomb attack at Gulshan-i-Iqbal park in Pakistan’s Lahore city on Sunday has killed at least 72 people and injured hundreds, including many children. According to rescue service spokeswoman Deeba Shahnaz at least 29 children, seven women and 34 men had been killed and about 340 people wounded. 25 are in critical condition. Amongst those who were killed, five remain unidentified till date due to their condition.
The park had amusement rides, a lake and a zoo. Being Easter Sunday, many people from the Christian community had gathered in evening to celebrate the auspicious day with their Muslim neighbours. It is then the blast tore through the park, killing indiscriminately. The suicide bomber blew himself up a few meters from a children’s play area, thus instantly turning the celebration ground to a tragic mourning site. “When the blast occurred, the flames were so high they reached above the trees, and I saw bodies flying in the air,” said Hasan Imran, 30, a resident who had gone to the park for a walk.
Who is responsible for the suicide bombing?
A splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat0ul-Ahrar, has taken the blame of the attack and stated that they targeted the Christians. Lahore, the capital of Punjab province in Pakistan, has been relatively peaceful in recent years, but the insurgents have demonstrated a chilling ability to continue attacks on soft targets. A spokesman of the splinter group, Ehsanullah Ehsan, has conveyed the message to Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, “He can do what he wants but he won’t be able to stop us. Our suicide bombers will continue these attacks.” The group has declared that it owes allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant but later said it was rejoining the Taliban campaign.
Action taken by the Pakistani government
The Punjab government ordered all public parks closed and declared three days of mourning taking effect immediately. Needless to say, the hospitals were thronged with relatives of those who met with the carnage in the blast. Many dead bodies were being kept in hospital wards since morgues were overcrowded.
Mr Sharif cancelled his scheduled visit to the USA as soon as he received the news of the violence. Addressing his nation on television, he promised that his government would not allow terrorists to “play with Pakistani lives…. We will not rest until the cost of this blood is avenged.” It is to be noted that Pakistan is a majority-Muslim state but the Christians constitute 2% of the population, counting above two million. The hardliner Muslims and Christian minority are at loggerheads with the former aiming to establish a strict Islamic law based on the Sharia.
General Asim Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff chaired a high-level meeting to review an operation in Punjab. The Nawaz Sharif government, with its power base in the province, had been resisting such a step earlier. 56 raids had been conducted by the Punjab police, 16 by Punjab’s counter terrorism department and 88 by local intelligence agencies. 5,221 suspected militants have been detained, 5005 people questioned and released, and 216 still being investigated on Tuesday.
Based on reports received by Reuters security and government officials have decided to launch a full-scale operation involving paramilitary Rangers.
Although Muhammad Usman, the district coordination officer in Lahore, has stated that they had no prior intelligence of the attack, Samuel Benjamin, a Christian rights activist in Lahore, claims that “I blame the government for not taking the security risk on Easter seriously.” “Its policy of selective crackdown accompanied by tolerating some and even supporting other terrorist groups is only making things difficult,” opines Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States and a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.
A string of attacks in the recent past
Although Lahore had been relatively peaceful for the past few years, it has been torn by bombings since 2014 when Pakistan launched an offensive against the Taliban and affiliated groups in the North Waziristan region. A popular provincial leader and eight others were killed in a bomb attack on his home. An explosion on bus carrying government officials in the north of the country killed at least 15 people earlier this month. On 8th March a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a court in Charsadda, , in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, about 30km from Peshawar. Of course, we all remember the gruesome gun fire on children of military personnel in an army school in Peshawar on 16th December last year.
International solidarity with the victims
After the recent blasts in Ankara and Brussels, terrorism struck Lahore, outpouring grief across the entire world. People from India took to social media condemning the attack and expressing solidarity towards the victims of the attack. As a small gesture towards showing their solidarity with the innocent victims of the brutal bombing, scores of people on Facebook came up with hashtag #IndiaStandWithPakistan. Many of them changed their profile pictures also in solidarity with the recent terrorist attacks across the globe.
