Tragic incident: Five passers-by killed, blast fails to hit target

Investigators believe the target was a bus of 50 passengers, most of whom went relatively unscathed.

KARACHI:

The passenger bus that was the main target of the Friday blast that took place near Gizri escaped without any major damage. A few others were not as lucky.

The bus was carrying around 50 passengers who were returning to their offices after having offered Friday prayers. Fearing a second attack, the passengers of the bus asked the driver to continue moving as the blast hit the bus, despite injuries to a few passengers.



“He didn’t stop anywhere till we had almost reached CM House,” one of the injured passengers, Mumtaz Hussain Naqvi, told The Express Tribune. “I felt something was thrown in. After that, there was darkness and all of us panicked.”

Standing beside a fellow passenger - Saleem Ahmed, who is a private secretary at CM House - Naqvi believes that the bus was the intended target of the attack. According to some passengers of the bus, those employed in different offices near CM House use the rented bus every Friday to go to Masjid Yasrib located in Defence Phase-IV.

“The blast hit us from the passengers’ side, where I was sitting with two other friends,” said Ahmed.

However, others claimed that the blast claim from a different direction. “The blast hit us from the back and I am sure that the bomb was in the car that was parked near us,” claimed another injured, Khubebur Rehman, who was standing with his maternal uncle, Dilawar Hussain.

Both had been waiting for a public bus after having offered their Friday prayers at a nearby mosque. However, the injuries that they had sustained were primarily from electric wires that fell on them after the blast, rather than from the blast itself.

Rehman was lying on the road and struggling with the electric wires, forcing Dilawar to hurriedly search for something to save his nephew from being electrocuted. “I got a plastic stick from a rickshaw without looking at the bodies of others and helped my nephew,” he said. The two were among the first patients to be brought to Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC).

Fareena, 35, was also admitted to the hospital, while her minor son was rushed to a private clinic near the blast scene. A motorcyclist, SM Zaffar Kalia, said that he was making his way home through the area after having offered Friday prayers. “The blast was very powerful and I saw several injured people lying on the road,” Kalia said. “Thank God, I survived,” he said, glancing at his sons.



The blast took place near the wall of the Goldfield Apartments in Clifton’s Block-8. The wall was damaged completely from the powerful blast while the windows and doors of several flats were also damaged.

According to the bomb disposal squad, the explosives were kept inside a rickshaw. The bomb, which weighed over 10 kilogrammes, was triggered via remote control. Five motorcycles and four Toyota Corolla cars, including two that were parked near the wall, were partially damaged. Four passenger rickshaws were also damaged.

“I was alone in my car when it happened,” said Abdul Wahid, who was driving one of the damaged cars. “Some of the passengers of a rickshaw were badly injured.”

Five persons, including a woman, died in the blast while over 30 others were injured. Four of the injured were admitted to JPMC in critical condition. “We received four bodies,” confirmed Dr Seemin Jamali, the joint JPMC executive director and incharge of the accidents and emergency ward.

Two rickshaw passengers, a woman, Farah Junaid, and her 17-year-old son, Yahya Abdullah Junaid, are among the dead. Shahzad, 25, and Sajid Ellahi, 40, were also killed.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 26^th, 2014.