Karachi had not even begun recovering from the bomb attack on an Ashura procession on December 28, and from the arson that followed, when another form of violence engulfed the city. A spate of killings erupted in certain localities and one of the worst hit areas was Lyari, where about 50 lives were lost in the first ten days of the month [confirm in Lyari alone?]. The incidents grew so severe that at a hastily arranged press conferences, the PPP and the MQM, the two main coalition parties in the Sindh government, came together in an apparent show of unity and ostensibly to offer explanations.

Nonetheless, the causes of the conflict remain unclear. Lyari’s violence has variously been attributed – depending on who is offering the explanation - to criminal gangs, land and drug mafias, political parties and ethnic groups. The murders have been called “target killings”, but it is clear that some innocent people who were not party workers or gang members were killed in the crossfire.

The neat regular rows of the makeshift hospital belie the dreadful sights that await one behind the curtains of its tented units. A spotless 15-bed unit is reserved for those recovering from injuries caused by bomb blasts, artillery shells, landmines, bullets and explosives. One of them is 35-year-old truck driver Mohammad Abdullah, the victim of a suicide bombing. It was difficult to keep one’s gaze steady — despite being heavily bandaged; it was obvious that the bones in the frontal part of Abdullah’s skull were missing while his left eyeball had been scooped out to leave a hollow socket behind. Since his admission, the nursing staff has been very careful to keep a mirror out of his reach.

En route to Punjab from Miranshah (North Waziristan Agency), Abdullah had made a pit stop at a serai adjacent to a police station in Bannu city. “I was having a cup of tea when a suicide bomber hit the police station,” he says. A nurse at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Surgical Hospital for Weapon-Wounded in Peshawar recalls when Abdullah was brought to the hospital last year: “He was in a bad shape: the front of his cranium had been blown off with the impact and the brain matter could be seen below.”
 

It was a balmy afternoon in March 2006 when some 20 children, all under 15 years of age, played cricket on plots F-620 and F-621 in Site Town. But the harmless afternoon fun turned into tragedy in moments as they unknowingly ran straight into toxic waste. Each of them sustained second- and third-degree burns. “I saw my son Iftikhar writhe in pain. He would cry incessantly and I could do nothing. I sat there helplessly as he died,” recalls Mohammad, father of Iftikhar who was part of the group that afternoon. Iftikhar succumbed to his injuries on April 28, 2006. Another child, Shiraz, survived but had to have his hands and legs amputated. “He will have to live with the disability for the rest of his life,” says Nur-ul-Rahman, a nurse and a community leader.

The death of Iftikhar and the injuries of the other affected children caught the attention of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; its investigations revealed that dumping of toxic waste has been the norm for quite sometime. But according to a 2006 report of the Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR), “it was the first time that such toxic and harmful substance had been dumped there ... certain areas [were] filled up and leveled recently ... the factory owners [then] dumped mud over the hazardous toxic waste to cover it up and hide it ... and the plot was cordoned off by a wall [after the incident].”