LAHORE, July 13: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has condemned the killing of nine trainee prison staff from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in a terrorist attack in Lahore on Thursday.

In a statement issued on Friday, the commission blasted lack of security for the victims and called for an efficient probe to apprehend the killers as well as for the soul searching that such attacks call for but which had been missing so far.

It said the HRCP was saddened by the brazen attack in Lahore in which nine trainee jail warders from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were killed and was utterly shocked by the ease with which terrorists managed to storm their hostel and walked away unchallenged afterwards.

The administration had conceded that the staff did not have security and the police chief says he was not aware that the trainee staffers were lodged there. The terrorists clearly had better intelligence than the police. The attack raised a lot of very disturbing and not wholly new questions. It was impossible to think that such an attack could have been launched without a considerable local support and might well have been solely the work of local militants, the commission said. The HRCP said: It has been quite a few months since terrorists had struck in Lahore, may be they do not look at the provincial government benevolently any more. This was a botch up at many levels in which no one looks good, but the provincial government had the obvious responsibility to ensure adequate security for the trainees. Without the negligence of the administration, it is unlikely that the killers would have achieved their designs with such an ease. HRCP is not qualified to offer an advice on matters of security but it must say that this attack demands a lot of soul searching and much more than the usual response to terrorism, which has been confined to condemnation and rhetoric.”

The HRCP said it was far from reassuring to see the finger pointing and point scoring by politicians following the killings. It was hoped that sanity would prevail sooner rather than later and the politicians would not fall for the terrorists’ ploy of stirring up ethnic tensions. Instead of indulging in blame game, the federal government and the governments of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab should invest their energies in bringing to justice the perpetrators of Thursday’s attack. The investigators must also probe and expose local networks of militants who were bent on destabilising Pakistan.