| 12 June 2004 | Saturday | 23 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
Some questions about Thursday's attack
The divisional headquarters civil hospital is facing problems due to the shortage of doctors, paramedical staff, medicines and lack of better facilities for staff and patients while the health department has not been taking interest to tackle these difficulties despite the concern voiced by the DHQ administration and the patients for the last two years.
Now medical superintendent Dr Nisar Ahmad Cheema has sent a memorandum to the Punjab government through the health secretary focusing on the problems being faced by the patients and the DHQ administration.
He emphasized that departments for 40-bed neuro surgery, 40-bed orthopaedic, 20-bed psychiatry and 10-bed dermatology should be constructed at the civil hospital quickly.
He said 1,500 patients were being registered at the hospital daily in outdoor, but they could not be provided proper facilities due to shortage of medical officers and the nursing staff. The DHQ, he said, was running with 438 beds and 22 wards which were quite insufficient.
He suggested that the government should arrange as soon as possible about 120 more medical officers, 10 nursing sisters, 80 computer operators, five technicians, including four medical specialists, four surgeons, four gynaecologists, four child specialists, a chest specialist, a psychiatrist, a skin specialist, two cardiologists, two neuro surgeons and other specialists, besides crucial life saving medicines.
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Construction work on a trauma centre at the divisional headquarters civil hospital was going on speedily, and it will be completed within the stipulated period while the construction of other uplift projects, including an underpass and another bridge on Upper Chenab Canal, will be started shortly.
This was stated by District Coordination Officer Fazeel Asghar at the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry the other day. He said Rs1.5 million had already been released for the construction of trauma centre.
The people of the city and suburban areas would benefit from it. He assured the participants that a medical college would be set up in the city as the chief minister and the corps commander were taking interest in establishing one in the city.
He said a home economics college would also be set up as promised by the chief minister during his recent visit here. He praised the industrialists and the business community for taking interest in beautifying the city by setting up green plots along the GT Road within the city's jurisdiction. He said the chief minister announced Rs100 million for the sewerage system, but it was not sufficient.
Earlier, chamber president Shaukat Javed Shaikh apprised him of the problems being faced by the industrialists and the business community and called for their solution on a priority basis.
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The all-Pakistan cutlery manufacturers have expressed concern over the lack of better facilities to small industrialists, and demanded that soft loans and relief in tariff should be provided to them.
Speaking at a seminar in Wazirabad the other day, association president Khalid Mahmood Chadha and industrialists Hameed Akhtar, Haji Mushtaq Ahmad, Shaikh Mohammad Iqbal, Sajjad Farooq and Mohammad Aslam said the cutlery industry was in a crisis due to inadequate facilities and lack of soft loans from commercial banks and the government.
They were of the views that the cottage industry could not be improved till the revamping of industrial policy and provision of soft loans to cutlery manufacturers and exporters on a priority basis.
They said tariff of gas and power supply should be reduced and sophisticated taxes imposed on the cutlery industry be eliminated. The seminar was told that as many as 300 units of cutlery were running in Wazirabad where 5,000 people were earning their livelihood.
But most of these units were in a crisis. The seminar adopted a resolution unanimously, and demanded that the government should provide relief to small industrialists in the coming budget.
Some questions about Thursday's attack
The exact number of people involved in the attack on Thursday has yet to be established, but a police official told this newspaper that there might have been more than eight people.
Another newspaper quoted a "source" involved in the investigation of the attack on the convoy of the commander V corps, Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, as saying that there could have been as many as 10 people.
It has now been established that the van used by the attackers and found abandoned near Defence View, which straddles the expressway connecting Korangi Road and Defence with Sharea Faisal, was stolen around two hours before the ambush happened.
At ten past nine, when the attack is reported to have taken place, the main Clifton Road is quite full with morning rush-hour traffic, especially people heading towards Saddar and the main business district of I. I. Chundrigar Road. The firing went on for several minutes.
A resident of Mohammad Ali Bogra Road said that it lasted for around four or five minutes, which seems a long time. The authorities have said that the abandoned van had blood stains on it which meant that some of the attackers were injured.
In fact, in response to a question asking whether the military authorities had "evaluated" the response of the guards accompanying the corps commander, ISPR DG Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said on a TV programme that at least some of the attackers had been injured but that they managed to take the injured or the bodies of their comrades with them.
The distance from the Clifton Bridge area to Defence View must be between five to seven kilometres, depending on the route taken. A van, especially one with its windows shattered by bullets (as pictures of the abandoned vehicle show), could not have been that difficult to miss provided that someone in the police or the military had radioed a message asking units to set up barriers on all major roads and look for the suspected vehicle.
Even if the law-enforcement agencies did not know where the attackers would be going to abandon their get-away vehicle, they could have positioned pickets on Khayaban-i-Roomi, Sunset Boulevard, Sharea Faisal and so on.
When the car was initially stolen in the morning, a message was aired on police control around two hours before the attack happened. Despite that, the vehicle was in an apparently high- security zone with several members of the law-enforcement agencies all within walking and viewing distance.
In several recent incidents in Karachi, the vehicles used have all been hijacked in the first half of the day, in fact usually during the morning, and used later in the day for attacks. This might point to a pattern which the police and other law-enforcement agencies should have discerned and taken pre-emptive measure to deal with.
Hence, the question that when the city is said to be on high alert, the theft by armed persons (the driver of the stolen vehicle has said that he noticed the men were carrying automatic weapons, that two were in police uniform and that they warned him not to tell the police, which he did and hence the airing of the message on police control) of the van should have rung alarms bells and the police should have been in a battle-ready position to effect a 'clamp-down' and increased checking of vehicles.
The other question, of course, has to do with how in the world does a bullet-riddled van full of armed assassins get away so easily in rush-hour traffic.