Hafeez Centre closed after two bomb threats

Threats made on 15 at noon and 4pm, plaza closed till Monday.

LAHORE:

The police twice vacated Hafeez Centre on Saturday after anonymous callers threatened to blow up the city’s busiest commercial centre for electronics products.

The centre was cleared at around noon after a call was made to the 15 emergency line from a public call office (PCO) saying that there was a bomb in the building. “We told the Hafeez Centre union to vacate the plaza immediately and two Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS) teams inspected the building,” Sub Inspector Mahmood told The Express Tribune. “They found nothing.”

At 4pm, another call was made to 15, this time from a mobile number. “The caller said they would bring down the plaza with a blast,” the SI said. Again, the police had the building vacated and inspected. Again, they found no explosives. An hour later, the union told the shopkeepers to close up and go home.

“There have been bomb threats here before, but never two in one day,” said shop owner Humayun Rasheed.

Jamil Khawaja, senior vice chairman of the Hafeez Centre Trader Welfare League, said that after receiving a bomb threat on a previous occasion, the union had told the police what number the threat had been phoned in from, but there had been no arrests made.

He said that the union had responded instantly to the police’s threat reports, getting the plaza cleared in 10 minutes. He said they had decided to close the plaza early as they feared an attack on the crowd of shopkeepers standing around outside waiting for the centre to reopen. “We announced that Hafeez Centre would be closed till Monday so they should leave,” Khawaja said.

SP Malik Awais said that the police would investigate further and find out by Monday who the mobile phone number was registered to and where the call was made from. He said that the mobile had been switched off immediately after the call was made.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2011.