ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan stunned the National Assembly on Thursday with the information that an additional district and sessions judge killed during a gun and suicide bomb attack on Islamabad’s district courts complex on Monday was the victim of claimed panic firing by his own bodyguard inside a bolted retiring room.

He said the guard had confessed to police that three bullets fired by him in panic from a 9mm pistol after an attacker’s suicide bomb blast near the court room killed judge Rafaqat Ahmed Khan Awan – one of 12 fatalities in one of the capital’s worst terrorist carnage in recent years that also wounded 28 people.

Mr Awan, his guard and the court reader had taken refuge in the judge’s retiring room after the attack by at least two gunmen, according to the minister’s account based on police investigations.

He said the guard stood behind the bolted door holding a loaded official pistol that he fired in panic after the nearby explosion and “unluckily this awful incident happened”.

The minister rejected some previous reports that the attackers had broken the court’s door before shooting at the judge or that the judge could been targeted because he did not entertain a murder complaint against former president Pervez Musharraf relating to the killing of a cleric at Islamabad’s famous Red Mosque during a military operation against militants hiding there in July 2007.

But the minister said another judge could have been an intended target of the attackers, but that judge did come to his court on that day.

Although he could not tell for now who was behind the attack, Chaudhry Nisar said: “We will God-willing find them in whatever hole they may be hiding and bring them to justice.”—Raja Asghar