Lahore blast victims warned of looming attack

Businessman Saeed Javed casts his eyes around his once-pristine lawn now littered with glass, metal and upended furniture, stunned by a suicide bomb blast, but not surprised.

Head covered in bandages and perched on his balcony, Saeed recounts how his upscale neighbourhood in Lahore had complained for months that a police facility across the road was a prime target just waiting to be hit.

Residents had passed on whispered tales of screams echoing from the basement at night after alleged militants were ushered into the two-storey building with their faces covered to be interrogated by security forces.

Whether the cries were true or not, there was one fact the residents of Model Town agreed upon, it was only a matter of time until militants, who last year attacked security targets in Lahore on four occasions, took revenge. Sure enough, on Monday morning as parents dropped their kids off at a nearby seminary

and as doctors, lawyers and businessmen prepared to leave for work, a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives at the police facility, killing 15 people and wounding 83 others.

The blast underscored the danger facing ordinary people in the nuclear-armed country, which is on the front line of the US-led war on Al-Qaeda.

“This bomb, it was expected any time. We did whatever we could, we brought it to the attention of the Government,” said Javed, 60, whose house was in tatters after the bombing just metres away.

A wave of suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan has killed more than 3,000 people since 2007. Blame has fallen on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants bitterly opposed to the government’s alliance with the United States.

Lahore, Pakistan’s historic cultural capital and home to many military and intelligence top brass, has been repeatedly in the militants’ sights, with more than 130 people killed in attacks in the past year.

Violence is usually concentrated largely in the lawless northwest border area with Afghanistan, but analysts have warned that extremism is taking a hold in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province which has Lahore as its capital.

“Lahore is not secure because it’s a big city where there are a lot of security offices and their headquarters, which are potential targets,” said Sarha Ahmed, a housewife.

She has decided to take her six-year-old daughter out of school for a few days after Monday’s attack left the child ‘frightened and depressed’.

In Model Town, where palatial homes surrounded by large lawns sit in the shade of blooming trees, residents are seething.

A woman in a colourful headscarf cornered Lahore’s top administration official Khusro Pervez at the blast site, screaming at him and demanding to know why the police interrogation facility was not moved.

A doctor who lives opposite the targeted building said they wrote to the Governor of Punjab province, local ministers and the Model Town society, upping their campaign after another blast in the area about a year ago.

“We warned them about everything, but they were not bothered,” he said, asking not to be named.

Pervez and Model Town police chief Ayyaz Saleem confirmed the authorities had received complaints and had considered moving the facility away from the residential area, but negotiations were ongoing when the bomber struck.

Officials, meanwhile, were cagey about the exact purpose of the building, rented by a unit known as the Special Intelligence Agency.

Pervez insisted to AFP that the building was simply used for routine investigations, but Lahore city police chief Pervez Rathore said security forces did question suspected militants there.

One local administrative official at the scene referred to it as an ‘undercover’ facility, and furtive chatter continues in Model Town.

“Our guard, who comes at night, says that there were some noises sometimes at night in the building, presuming that some accused were being tortured,” said Noorul Ora, 25, who was studying in the religious academy when the blast hit.

Dawn.com