Unknown assailants: After 10 months, PNS Mehran attackers buried

With no claims by relatives and trails gone cold, officials allow burial .

KARACHI: The bodies of four terrorists involved in a brazen attack on Pakistan Navy’s main aviation base on May 22, 2011 have been finally buried in unmarked graves for the unknown.

The dramatic siege on the PNS Mehran base in Karachi lasted 17 hours, leaving at least 10 security personnel dead and destroying two P3C Orion reconnaissance aircraft.

The bodies had been languishing at an Edhi morgue in the months since, but were eventually buried after painstaking intelligence surveillance work went in vain. The authorities had hoped that relatives of the dead would come forward to claim the bodies, but none did.

The bodies were kept at the Edhi morgue after the attack with the express orders from authorities that, unless they give the go-ahead, they should not be laid to rest.

“We finally got the go-ahead a few weeks ago and now they’ve been buried in one of our graveyards for the unknown,” the welfare organisation Edhi’s representative Anwar Kazmi said.

A number of DNA samples were collected from the mutilated bodies during the time the bodies were at the morgue, but despite many tests no conclusive results of their identity could be ascertained. Even matches from the database of NADRA were inconclusive.

Sources close to the investigation revealed that the intelligence agencies were hoping that some of the relatives of the dead would eventually come forward to claim the bodies.

“This has happened in the past and we were able to track down associates of terrorists when their families came forward to claim their dead,” a senior intelligence official said.

However, the authorities remained unlucky with the remains of the PNS Mehran attackers and ordered their bodies to be disposed of.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 26^th, 2012.