FAR from the hustle and bustle of the local government polls, an eerie silence prevails in a street in Jacobabad. Some colourful bunting are still scattered around. One portion of the road has been cordoned off with bricks by residents of the area, most of whom come from middle- or lower-middle income Shia and Sunni families.

In this street in Lashari Mohallah off Quetta Road, no one has touched or cleaned up this spot. They fear it may destroy evidence. This is where, on the 9th of Muharram, a suicide bomber detonated his jacket in a Duldul procession, killing over 25 people and injuring dozens of others. The dead included both Shias and Sunnis.

“Look at this door,” says Taimoor Lashari, a resident of the area. It is pockmarked with the ball bearings of the bomb. The walls in this narrow street still bear marks of the bloodbath that took place here. I cannot help but shudder at the thought of the intensity of the explosion, and its effect in these tight confines.

The chaos that ensued, the screams and the stench of death are fresh in the residents’ memory. They recall the wail of the ambulances that arrived to move the dead and the injured. It is being claimed that the bomber meant to target a larger mourning procession, but was unable to get access to it, so he blew himself up here. According to a counter-terrorism officer, this indicates that the bomber was not a local man and had either come from another area, or was a foreigner.

As I ask Taimoor about the bricks cordoning off the area, another resident, Rahim Lashari, passes by, murmuring: “It is the government’s job to collect evidence, not ours.”

Another resident, Zahid Lashari, shows me a matchbox containing some half a dozen ball bearings. “I collected them from here,” he tells me.

“When I heard the explosion I rushed to help. The police and the ambulances came later.”

Pointing towards an alam [standard] put up near the wall of a Sunni family’s home, he adds that the participants in the ill-fated pirh had paid their respects to it and were about to move away when the bomb went off.

Outside of Karachi, this is the first suicide bombing in Sindh. The loss of lives, including those of children, have yet to catch the attention of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif though, who has not so far visited Jacobabad — or even Shikarpur, where the bombing of a Shia mosque in January caused dozens of deaths.

“Mian sahib, Jacobabad is also a part of Pakistan,” says Ehsan Ali sarcastically. He is a representative of the Shia community here, and he confirms that it has been announced that heirs of the dead will be paid Rs2 million, while those who suffered grievous and minor injuries will be given Rs1m and Rs0.2m respectively.

Ehsan’s family organises Jacobabad’s main mourning procession from their Syed Sher Shah haveli.

“This is a place where people come out to stand guard over temples if there is any threat to the Hindu community,” says retired professor Ghulam Nabi Sadhayo, who earned a PhD on the symbolic poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. “We never thought such an incident could occur here. It is without doubt the work of some banned outfit. It was perhaps in 1935 that there were Hindu-Muslim clashes here, but we haven’t seen anything like that in the post-partition period.”

Of late, Jacobabad and other parts of upper Sindh have witnessed the growth of religious seminaries. Forces with secular leanings have been raising the issue to pressurise the government into taking action to check this trend and that of religious parties’ increasing influence.

Police investigators have managed to obtain a fingerprint of the Jacobabad suicide bomber, but no clue to his identity has been found in the National Database and Registration Authority records. It would appear that he was not registered with Nadra. Officers note a close nexus between the Jacobabad blast and what is going on in Balochistan, especially Mastung. They believe that it is a spillover effect of the extremist mindset rapidly penetrating this part of Sindh, and going unnoticed despite being obvious.

“I can’t go into the details with you,” says Dr Sanaullah Abbasi, recently assigned the task of running the Sindh police’s counter-terrorism department. “I will say though that there are very specific details that we have now, and suspects have been picked up. There are also indications that there was negligence on the part of the lower police and Special Branch hierarchy.” But even Dr Abbasi’s department, people say, has yet to make its presence felt in Sindh, outside of Karachi.

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2015

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