Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  Far from resilience, in the eyes of the people I met, there was only anguish. Arsalan’s mother kept wondering why the church was bombed and she told me that her son was getting better. There were other stories related to terrorism and while I couldn’t visit those places, I tried to report them as best as I could. One was about a teenager who saved his school. Nearly eleven months before the brutal Army Public School bombing in Peshawar in 2014, a chubby teenager had stopped a suicide bomber outside the gate of his government school in Hangu (in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), garnering international attention. Young Aitizaz Hussain, a student of class nine, grappled with a bulky stranger that morning of 6 January 2014 and died when the bomber blew himself up. He had asked the man to stop and even threw a stone at him. In a country inured to violent death, his story tugged at the hearts of everyone, and he was an instant martyr and hero. The young boy was immediately given the highest civilian honour and received accolades from another celebrity terror victim, Malala Yousafzai. Aitizaz saved hundreds of his schoolmates from death, and drew out a statement from the prime minister’s office. His school is in Ibhrahimzai, a Shia-dominated area, and the government decided to name it after the boy who saved it from destruction.

  When death came smiling

  On the face of it, it was just another suicide bomb attack, but this time it killed a young politician and several others sitting near him. When Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Law Minister Israrullah Khan Gandapur walked a few steps to greet one of the many visitors in his hujra at Kolachi on Bakri Id, he didn’t think it would be the last thing he did. It was one of the bizarre incidents I wrote about thanks to a chance encounter with someone who knew the family. The Gandapurs were an old political family from Dera Ismail Khan district in KPK, and no one knows the real reason which eventually led to this handsome young minister being blown up. Israrullah Khan exchanged greetings with his young visitor who was wearing new clothes, who embraced him and then detonated the bomb strapped to his body. It was the first day of Bakri Id and they were gathered in the hujra outside his residence at Kolachi in Dera Ismail Khan. The minister was killed on the spot, along with seven others, while his older brother, Ikramullah, survived. Later we knew that the suicide bomber was between twenty and twenty-two years old and had spoken to the minister in the local language. Coming after the many suicide bomb attacks in KPK, this one added to the existing insecurity, and media reports suggested he could have been killed by a little-known terror outfit in connection with the sensational jail breaks in Dera Ismail Khan, but that was only one of the many speculations.

  Faisal Karim Kundi, a PPP politician from Dera Ismail Khan and a former deputy speaker of the National Assembly, was one of the few people to meet him before he died. ‘It was the custom to go to greet people who come to visit you on Id day and Israrullah walked eight to ten feet to greet his visitor before it all ended.’ Married in 2006, Israrullah is survived by his wife, an infant daughter and a son.

  The thirty-nine-year-old held a master’s in political science, and started his studies in Kulachi before completing them in Peshawar. That was his third term in the provincial assembly which he contested as an Independent, and later joined the PTI. He took to active politics after the death of his father, Sardar Inayatullah Khan Gandapur, a former chief minister of the North-West Frontier Province and a strong influence. The family has a close relationship with Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-Fazl-ur-Rehman faction) and they backed each other during the elections. In a by-election in Dera Ismail Khan and Tank area for the National Assembly, even though the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and the others had ranged themselves against the maulana’s party, Israrullah supported the maulana’s son, Asad Mehmood, who lost.

  Israrullah did get some threats since 2012 and there had been an attempt on his life in April 2013 too. Hours before his death, he had sent a text message to a friend asking him to come and meet him that evening before it was too late, said Shiraz Paracha, on whom I had to rely once again. Everyone was talking about this message and whether it was a premonition of sorts. That seems unlikely going by a photo taken before Israrullah was killed. It showed a smiling, relaxed politician meeting people.

  Paracha knew him for a few months and said he was one of the finest members of the provincial Cabinet in terms of his extensive knowledge about constitutional affairs and his understanding of the rules of business. He had a grasp of governance issues and in a short period of time he had become one of the shining stars of the PTI government. He called him a ‘thorough gentleman’ and said that he would come prepared for meetings and put the bureaucrats on the back foot. There was a perception, unfortunately, in KPK that politicians were not up to scratch but this young man was an outstanding exception.

  Unlike his father, Israrullah was known for his simple lifestyle. He mingled with people and met them easily. Paracha rued that he was so accessible, and that could be one of the reasons for his death.

  I was keen on reconstructing the picture of the man who was killed in this wanton fashion even though there were many such incidents, and the country moved in a daze from one numbing tragedy to another. I didn’t even know this man, and couldn’t even visit his home, but the casual and everyday quality of greeting a visitor during Id had acquired a gruesome and chilling turn. It was an incident that replayed in my mind like a stuck record.

  A safe capital

  The Islamabad district court complex in F-8 Markaz, which also houses the Regional Transport Office (RTO) and the excise department, was a far cry from any district court I have seen. The rooms were low-ceilinged, poky and crowded. Once my husband, who loved to potter about in the narrow by-lanes walked into a court in session, startling everyone including the judge who asked him what he was doing there. Venkat, conscious for the first time that he had meandered into the unknown, replied he was strolling around and didn’t think this was a serious courtroom. The judge soundly ticked him off. It was rather difficult to believe that courts could run in this ramshackle complex, which was across the road from where I lived. It also housed the Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) where the 26/11 trial was under way. I had gone there one morning to meet the special public prosecutor. It was so nondescript and easy to target as it had none of the security trappings, like CCTVs or monitored gates.

  A week after the minister for interior had declared Islamabad safe, there was a deadly attack (3 March 2014) on the court complex. It was not the neatly arranged legs of a suicide bomber or the bloodied, narrow lanes that stayed in my mind, but the calm, almost everyday actions of gloved policemen picking up pieces of flesh and putting them into a plastic bag. The first blast shook the glass windows of my house and I thought everything was going to collapse. I tweeted helplessly; there was nothing on TV. And soon the news came in and I heard another deafening explosion; then the firing continued in staccato bursts. It was a sound I’d heard before—during the riots back home in 1992–93 and the same staccato bursts during the 26/11 terror strike while standing outside the CST in the darkness when Kasab and his companion were raining bullets on travellers in the train station. It was a sound I would never forget.

  My first thoughts were relief that my husband was back in India and he was not pottering about in those wretched by-lanes. He knew many of the people by name and asked if the man who sold samosas had survived the blast when I called to tell him. I waited for things to calm down before I ventured across the road. I thought the area would be sealed off but just as in India where there is no sanctity to a crime scene, I realized everyone was walking around unhindered. There was yellow tape on the main road, guarded by policemen, and I waited hesitantly before I saw a TV journalist ducking under the tape and walking across. I followed him—all the shops were closed and there was silence everywhere. I walked past the ATC and to the narrow lane full of blood and a thick layer of broken glass. The courts, judges’ chambers, lawyers’ offices, Xerox centres and shops were packed into the thin lanes now emptied of the routine crowd. Not a single shop or court
room was untouched; there was blood in big and small puddles, and pieces of flesh; soon I reached the courts where one of the suicide bombers had blown himself up. Being a reporter in Mumbai had exposed me to a lot of violence and blood since 1992–93. We had to visit morgues regularly and scenes of communal carnage and blasts. There were quite a few sights I wish I hadn’t seen. We had actually done a body count, visiting the city morgues after the December 1992 riots, and after the blasts on 12 March 1993. But now after many years, I felt I had seen enough for a lifetime. I took pictures of the horrifying scenes before me with my cell phone, but that mechanical action didn’t reduce the horror of what I saw.

  People were bursting with stories: that morning a group of five to ten young men (there were varying versions) dressed in salwar kameez with shawls draped over them, walked into the court complex and started firing, throwing grenades, and two of them had lethal vests. It was that easy, no one stopped them; there was a calm, almost casual quality about these terror attacks. This was the new guerrilla tactic, the opposite of surprise—no surprise. Walk in with guns and people will notice only when you start firing and by then it’s too late. We saw that in Mumbai too.

  Policemen were picking up pieces of flesh from here and there and putting them into plastic bags. They would be then deposited into a large brown carton-like paper bag. Police and officials explained the scene patiently to us. These grim men were equally horrified but, like me, were trying to do their job. These were once people, I thought, as I peered into the bag. After that, I couldn’t eat blood oranges, which were then in season, though I loved the fruit. The spooks I had seen during Mama Qadeer’s march were milling around and I grinned at them. Beard and Chubby were absent, or so I thought. They had a way of knowing everything I did though (through GPS tracking, I learnt later).

  There was a small crater where one of the suicide bombers had blown himself up. One policeman had climbed up a ladder to retrieve a large lump of flesh stuck high up in the electric wires. A bloody portion of the wall screened by a white cloth was where the suicide bomber’s head had left a mark. It had been blown that high. A pair of legs lay neatly arranged nearby outside the chamber of the additional sessions judge, Rafakat Awan.

  Lawyer Khalid Mahmood was going back to his office when he saw five young men in their early twenties, bearded and wearing salwar kameez, carrying AK-47s and grenades, with bags slung on their shoulders. His white sleeves were stained with blood as he had helped carry the victims to hospital. He had removed nine bodies. At 9.19 a.m. he called the then Islamabad inspector general of police, Sikandar Hayat, who said he didn’t know about the firing. An outraged Mahmood kept showing me his cell phone to show the time of the call.

  The gunmen shot a senior lawyer Rao Rashid Iqbal Khan and moved to Gilani Hall near the canteen. Another judge, Adnan Jamali, was also shot at. Lawyers had complained a week before that the court was vulnerable as it had no CCTVs or a proper security mechanism in place. Rana Abid Farooq was sitting in his lawyer’s office when the gunmen fired through the glass windows. Abdul Ghaffar lay on the ground under a chair to escape the firing. He took me to the small, narrow office and I wondered how he had managed to survive even if he hid under a chair. There were two suicide bombers who were killed and two of the gunmen managed to escape—that’s what officials on the site said. Orders to search for the men who escaped were given in hushed tones. I looked around half expecting a sniper or another bomber. Everyone seemed clueless.

  Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, who headed the Islamabad High Court bar association, had a narrow escape but his associate, young Fizza Malik, was killed and so were two of his staff. Almost everyone knew the additional sessions judge, Awan, and said that he did not try to escape when he was told about the attack—and he paid for it with his life. Twelve people were killed and twenty-eight injured in the attack which lasted for about thirty to forty minutes. When I went to the Supreme Court which took suo motu notice of the attack a week later, angry lawyers said the police refused to fire, saying that their guns were not working or that if they fired, then the terrorists would come towards them. Only one brave policeman defied this pattern and fired at a suicide bomber, it was said, who fell down and blew himself up. The policeman, too, was killed.

  The court was critical of the contradictory statements by the police. ‘When will you understand how to tackle terrorism?’ Justice Azmat Saeed Sheikh asked, adding that they needed to go to a bookshop and read up. I saw the helpless judiciary trying to instil some order into the investigation but with little effect. There seemed to be no SOPs even though the country had been fighting terror for over a decade. The police were bumbling and fearful, and the lack of security and warnings were to prove costly as there was another blast soon.

  A lethal carton of guavas

  A month after the district court bombing, it was the turn of the Sabzi Mandi in sector I-10. A powerful bomb went off during the busy auction time around 8.05 a.m. in the sprawling fruit and vegetable market in the capital, killing at least twenty-four persons and injuring close to 100. The five-kg bomb was planted in a carton of guavas. Thousands of people throng the Sabzi Mandi from 5 a.m. for the auction. Dilawar Khan, a commission agent, said the auction was under way when the bomb went off just 100 feet away from him. He didn’t give himself any time to recover, but started helping the injured people into cars. He kept thanking Allah for his miraculous escape.

  Naqash, a TV cameraman, reached there soon after 8 a.m. to find a scene of devastation. He saw bodies lying all around, and private cars ferrying the injured. Some bodies were piled up in a pickup, and the ambulances were yet to arrive. Ripe guavas lay everywhere and there was a small crater in the place where the auction had been taking place which was cordoned off with yellow tape. As teams of police stood around, scared workers and commission agents stood in the stalls, at a distance, watching the scene in silence. Gul Mohammed, a commission agent, was having breakfast when he heard the loud explosion in his house opposite the market. His wife thought a wall had collapsed, but his son called him to say it was a bomb blast.

  The Sabzi Mandi is the central market for the Punjab province where all the fruit crates are unloaded, auctioned and transported to other parts of the country. Gul recalled a bomb blast nearly fifteen years ago in the fruit market and that too had a high casualty count. He said it was the season for guavas and that was why the auction was so crowded. At the office of the Anjuman Wholesale Fruit Commission Agents, an umbrella group of agents, near the market, there was a furious debate on the need for scanners and more security. Tahir Ayub, its general secretary, explained that the auction usually began at 5 a.m. every day and this was the biggest market in the region, with fruits coming in from all over the place, including India by way of the LoC, as well as China and Kabul. The auction was almost over when the bomb went off. While I was talking to the men in their office, one of them asked me who I was reporting for, and the minute I said The Hindu and India, the bomb blast was forgotten; they insisted I have tea and said wonderful things about my country. They wouldn’t let me leave and I had a difficult time explaining that I couldn’t sit and chat with them as I had to go to the hospital to check on the injured for my news report. They let me go after much pestering but it’s something that always amuses me when I think of the unhappy relations between the two countries.

  The market, spread over twenty-five acres, was a security nightmare. There was no compound wall and the security guards were not even armed. There was no system to scan the trucks or the goods, and the volume of business was very high. There were 300 firms dealing in fruit and an equal number in vegetables. At least 100,000 people visit the market daily and it had been working almost round the clock since 1983 when it was moved here. It was mostly poor vendors and daily wage labourers who were killed or injured.

  Terror and trial

  For the first time in a terror attack in India, a perpetrator, Ajmal Kasab, was caught fleeing the police at a beachfront in Mumbai. His accomplice was s
hot dead by a band of Mumbai policemen, some of whom had never fired a gun before, while Constable Tukaram Omble who held on to Kasab’s gun, became an unwitting martyr. The Dadasaheb Bhadkamkar Marg police were the unassuming heroes of that encounter. I had interviewed some of them after the incident and they didn’t know that a routine nakabandi (or a stop-and-check operation) would result in actually catching a terrorist who had killed dozens of people in the city at random, including some top police officers.

  Before carjacking a silver Skoda, Kasab and his accomplice were photographed by AFP’s Sebastian Fernandes at the CST. He was later interrogated by Rakesh Maria then the joint commissioner of crime, Mumbai Police; for some reason, extensive recordings of the interrogation of Kasab were played on television, and if I recall correctly, Maria ended the grilling by asking Kasab if his ‘friends’ (who were all dead) got the promised number of virgins in heaven.

  Kasab, it turned out, was from Faridkot in Okara district of the Punjab. A news report confirmed his parents lived there, and his father even identified Kasab from Fernandes’s famous photograph, amid denials from Pakistan. For the first time, the Indian government which had been pointing fingers at its neighbour for sponsoring terror strikes since 1992, said it had what it called ‘hard evidence’. It also had voice recordings, which BBC’s Channel 4 broadcast in its film on the terror strike where you could hear voices egging on the men with guns in the Chabad House and the other places they attacked. But apparently, this evidence was not enough—at least that’s what the lawyers for the accused said. However, the evidence from the phone calls was presented to Pakistan, and seven persons, including one of the masterminds, Lashkar-e-Taiba Commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, were arrested after the attack. To the Indian government’s consternation, Pakistan steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the Lashkar-e-Taiba founder, Hafiz Saeed, was involved in 26/11. The trial was something I was keen on tracking since I had covered the attack in some detail and followed Kasab’s fate at home. India had sent dossiers to Pakistan as evidence and there was a feeling that this time the culprits could be nailed. In Mumbai the high-profile trial of Kasab was held in a prison, and the media personnel needed special accreditation with biometric fingerprinting for attendance. There was a special cell connected to the court built for Kasab at a cost of Rs 2 crore, and security was tight. Ujjwal Nikam was a star special public prosecutor and used to give bites to the media every day. There was daily coverage of everything about the trial—the evidence, the cross-examination, the charges, how Kasab looked, what he said, how he cried or didn’t cry, what he ate. Nikam’s statements, some of which he has confessed to making up for effect (for instance that biryani was fed to Kasab)30 were played up widely. He was an authority on the trial and people hung on to his every word.