‘Suicide bomber’ returns home

Alleged 'suicide bomber' of the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine attack had gone missing a few days before Ediul Fitr.

An alleged suicide bomber, who reported to have attacked the shrine of a Sufi saint in Karachi earlier this month, has returned home in Punjab on Friday.

Ishtiaq Zafar, 27, and a drug addict, returned home in the Meer Koh village in Daska tehsil of Sialkot district. Police and intelligence agencies had “concluded” that Zafar had carried out the suicide bombing on the shrine of Karachi’s patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi on October 7.

According to his mother Munawar Bibi, Zafar had gone missing a few days before Ediul Fitr. And the family had not heard from him until the Karachi shrine attack. They had also filed a complaint with the Daska police.

After the Abdul Shah Ghazi shrine attack, police and intelligence agencies contacted the family, telling them that their son was the suicide bomber involved in the bombing.

“They kept asking me to say that the head found at the site of the suicide attack was that of my son,” Bibi told The Express Tribune. She refused to admit any such thing, insisting her son could not be a terrorist. The Daska police did not believe her. She was detained and allegedly tortured for being the mother of a “terrorist”.

To everyone’s surprise, Zafar returned home in Daska safe and sound on Friday, ending at least his mother’s ordeal.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 23^rd, 2010.