July 29, 2007	Sunday	Rajab 13, 1428

ISLAMABAD, July 28: Jasmine Bibi, 40, was trying to coup with her disturbing memories of the first ever curfew clamped in her area during the Lal Masjid stand-off earlier this month which ended in bloodshed.

But, last Friday turned out to be a grim reminder that Islamabad may still took longer to achieve the beauty and peace it was deprived of recently.

As widely feared, the reopening of the Lal Masjid brought with it another reaction and fear among the residents of Sector G-6 of another possible stand-off or operation in the afternoon. Yet the evening turned out to be the deadliest. A suicide bomber blew himself up near Jasmine’s neighbourhood at Aabpara Market and killed more than two dozen people.

“I had never thought that a day will come when I will have to see so much blood and so many bodies,” she says with tears in her eyes.

Jasmine is the wife of a government employee, living in the quarters near Lal Masjid. She was one of the many women and children who had come out of their houses to see what had happened after they heard the explosion.

“My little daughter started vomiting when she saw the blood soaked bodies and injured people,” says Ehsan Ali, a resident of Muzaffarabad. “She had never ever heard such a huge blast in her life and she lost conscious.”

Mr Ali had brought his wife and eight-year-old daughter Husna to Islamabad to visit his brother-in-law, who is living in the Aabpara government servant quarters.

“Just five minutes before the blast, I bought a Jazz pre- paid card from a PCO where the blast took place,” Mohammad Alamgir Khan was telling his mother on his cellphone. “Thanks God, I am alive.”

Mr Khan, while talking to Dawn, said that his family was living in Peshawar. “I informed my parents that I am safe.”

He said: “I wonder what would have happened to me if I had reached the PCO a few minutes late or not left it on time. No one is safe in this country.”

The shocked man takes a pause and adds: “However, I have found a new life.”

Suicide bomb blasts have taught one lesson to the people of the federal capital that it is better to stay at a reasonable distance from the places where policemen are stationed.

“When I see policemen standing some where, I often change my way if possible. Everybody knows that policemen could be the softest targets for suicide bombers,” said Ehsan Danish, a resident of Rawalpindi, who owns a shop at Aabpara market. Many people have also started staying away from busy markets and big gatherings in Islamabad.