The situation is graver especially because militants who carried out the attacks on Ashura and Chehlum last year are still operating without hindrance. In fact, there is a huge split in the police and intelligence community about who actually was involved in those incidents.
“In my opinion, this is the most dangerous time of the year,” said Special Investigation Unit (SIU) Chief SSP Raja Umer Khattab.
The police officer, who claimed a breakthrough in last year’s Ashura and Chehlum attacks when his unit apprehended members of an al Qaeda-linked militant outfit, said there are three terrorist groups currently active in the city. These groups, Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Jundullah are armed with sophisticated arms and explosives.
“The TTP and the LeJ might stage suicide attacks, while Jundullah may use a new type of explosives like they did last year,” Khattab said.
The LeJ, which is notorious for striking at Shias, is being headed by Malik Tassudaq in the city, while the Karachi-based Jundullah is being led by Haider alias Bhai and Mehmood alias Umer. CID has requested not to name the TTP chief of Karachi as they claim that it will compromise their investigations into the CID Civil Lines blast case.
Khattab believes Jundullah is the most potent of the three. “After last year’s attacks, they’ve been awfully quiet. The group’s expertise and innovation in making new types of bombs is overwhelming,” he said.
Sindh police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID) and intelligence officials have also issued warnings to police stations across the city to take all necessary precautions.
Last year’s attacks
The split in the police force into last year’s investigations into the Ashura and Chehlum blasts has widened. While the SIU insists that Jundullah was ‘most probably’ behind the attacks, the CID says its case file remains open and inconclusive.
Senior CID officials on condition of anonymity point out loopholes in the story that Jundullah was behind the attacks. They say Jundullah has no history of sectarian attacks. “Also, we tried to copy the SIU methods in tracing the phone numbers from SIMs recovered from unexploded bombs, but we didn’t find any Jundullah link,” he said.
Another official said that even if one assumed that the suspects caught in the immediate aftermath of the Ashura blast belong to Jundullah, then who carried out the Chehlum attacks.
Khattab, meanwhile, contests the CID claim and says forensic analysis have proved his unit’s investigations. He says his unit recovered a bomb that matched the type of explosives used in the Ashura blasts. “Also, the glue, blast cords and nuts found from Shadman Town (a few days after the Ashura attack) and the unexploded bomb from Jinnah hospital (in the Chehlum blast) were from the same batch. Based on these forensic methods, I conclude that the same group that staged the Ashura attacks was behind the Chehlum strike.”
When asked about the Lahore Capital City Police Officer’s claim that they apprehended a suspect involved in the Ahmedi place of worship attack, who also confessed his involvement in the Ashura attack, Khattab said the CID Lahore to this day had not allowed him to interrogate the suspect. The suspect reportedly belonged to Harkat al Jihad Islami.
However, the SIU chief added cautiously that he was not claiming that he had solved last year’s case 100 per cent. Investigation is a long and tedious process, he says. “But to all those who dispute my unit’s claim, I ask them to come up with a better investigation and prove me wrong. Truth is nobody else was able to come close to my unit’s work,” he said.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 10th, 2010.
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