Four months on: ICRC awaits headway in amateur bomb blast case

Authorities blame ICRC for refusing to cooperate.

KARACHI:

Four months have passed since the low-intensity explosion outside the International Committee of Red Cross’s main office on Tipu Sultan on June 24, but the case remains a mystery.

While the Red Cross representatives maintain that the authorities have yet to inform them about any progress made, counter terrorism officials blame the international humanitarian organisation for refusing to cooperate with them, turning it into a ‘blind case’.

“We still don’t know who was involved in the attack,” ICRC head in Karachi Peter Lick told The Express Tribune.

Since the attack, the ICRC increased its security. Extra private security guards man the gate round the clock and new security cameras have also been installed.

Senior officials of the Crime Investigation Department and Criminal Investigation Agency, however, blame the ICRC for what they say is refusing to cooperate with them in cracking the case. “The problem is not at our end at all. It’s just that everything that we’ve asked for has been flatly refused,” a senior CID official said.

According to him the ICRC had received a threatening email just days before the attack. But the details of the email through which one could track the source of the sender were not shared with the authorities. Also, the CID official says that some employees of the ICRC, including one in Islamabad and another in Karachi, had left the organisation on a disgruntled note just days before the attack. “But when details of their employees were sought, we were refused access to it,” he said.

A CIA official says he believes whoever planted the ‘amateurish’ bomb was either a former employee of the ICRC or some “idiot” who has no clue about how to make a “real bomb”. “The idea was probably to scare them off,” the officer said, adding that the objective seems to have been achieved.

This was the first time that glycerin was used in an explosive device in Karachi. It was smeared on the front gate of the ICRC office early in the morning.

Also, the nuts and bolts used in the device are normally found in dumper trucks, and are thus too heavy to act as shrapnel. Due to the poor quality of the bomb, the CIA official ruled out the involvement of any major terrorist groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban since, according to him, their devices are sophistically designed to inflict the maximum damage. “This device couldn’t even put a hole in the gate.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 26^th, 2011.