ISLAMABAD: The civil judge reached his courtroom early on Monday morning in the hope of wrapping up his work and leave by the afternoon.

However, he had barely begun hearing the first case when he heard a loud noise from outside.

“It didn’t take long to realise that it was the sound of firing,” he told Dawn.

Unfortunately, the judges of the lower courts are no stranger to the sound of gunfire.

“I thought somebody had attacked a courtroom nearby,” he explained, adding that he left the courtroom and took refuge in his chamber.

The judge didn’t think of leaving as there was no backdoor exit in the building that housed his courtroom and he feared that he would run into the attackers if he used the only entrance.

Rana Abid Nazir Khan, a lawyer at the district courts, was also with the sessions judge at that time.

“We both hid in the chamber,” said Khan.

“After hiding in the chambers for about half an hour, I contacted the other judges who too had sought refuge here and there and we left quietly,” said the visibly traumatised judge, Raja Jawad Abbas Hassan.

Hassan, a district and sessions judge, was especially traumatised as just a week earlier he reviewed the security situation at the courts and discussed it with his counterparts.

Dawn has learnt that the judges were examining the security arrangements as they too were concerned about the spate of terrorist attacks in the country and feared that the militants may attack Islamabad in retaliation to the air strikes in the tribal agencies.

It should be remembered that the district courts in Islamabad are located in the middle of a commercial centre and are surrounded by shops and restaurants that can easily be accessed by anyone.

This makes them particularly vulnerable.

In the meeting it was also discussed that the security wall that surrounded the district courts was too low and would not prove an effective deterrent in case of any terror attack.

In fact, a couple of years earlier Hassan had proposed that the six entry points at different intervals along the security wall could prove hazardous.

He had suggested that there should be a single entry and exit point for the courts, which could then be strictly monitored.

However, his proposal was turned down by the lawyers who thought a single point would prove cumbersome and time consuming.

“At that time, the sessions judge had also pushed for the installation of CCTV cameras at different points but the district administration did not implement these suggestions,” said a former sessions judge.

Another lawyer who too was present in the court of civil judge Sanam Bokhari did not take the sound of gunfire seriously.

“I told the judge that they were probably cricket lovers who were still excited about Pakistan’s victory over India on Sunday night,” he said.

“But when the firing continued and there were sounds of hand grenades exploding, the worried judge asked me to check.”

When the lawyer came out to check, he saw “three men firing indiscriminately at the chambers of the judges and the lawyers.”

According to him, the attackers entered the district courts premises from two separate locations but escaped via the main parking space in front of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra)’s office at F-8 Markaz in a black double cabin vehicle.