Quetta: Situated at the mouth of the Quetta Cantonment, Shuhada Chowk stands next to Police Inspector General Ehsan Mehboob’s office. This has been the site of several terrorist attacks before.

“Thankfully, our IG sahib was not present at his office at the time of the incident,” says a police constable.

One of the eyewitnesses was on Mission Road a few minutes before the car exploded. “There were around a dozen policemen surrounding the car and I knew something was going to happen, so I left the scene. Then I heard a huge bang which shattered the windows of buildings on Mission Road.”

Another resident of Mission Road, a few yards away from the site of the explosion, says, “I woke up to the horrifying sound of the explosion, it shattered the windows of my house.”

In 2013, as many as 30 policemen, including a DIG and an SP, were killed in a suicide attack while they were offering funeral prayers for a senior police officer in the Police Lines, a stone’s throw from the site of Friday’s attack.

The trauma centre of the Civil Hospital was a site of mourning as the relatives of those injured and deceased arrived to inquire after their loved ones.

Sarfaraz Ahmad, one of the injured policemen, told Dawn that he hailed from Punjab and did not have any immediate family members in the city. “I am a Special Branch inspector responsible for frisking people at the IG police office,” he introduced himself, adding that his family lived in Punjab but he had a nephew in Quetta who taught at a public school.

Rehmat Ullah, another policeman, suffered severe burns and fractures in hands and legs.

He was wrapped in a sheet and he explained that his uniform had been burnt.

“We saw a teenager boy, around 18 years old, driving toward China check-post of the Quetta Cantonment. He collided with a barricade close to the IG police office.

“At first, we did not think he was a suicide bomber. We thought he was a local and had, perhaps, only just learned how to drive. Suddenly, our colleagues rushed to him, pushing his vehicle away from the IG Office. The car exploded near the roundabout, after the policemen tried to search it.”

He added: “There were bodies all around us...we were all crying for help.”

Constable Syed Ranjan Ali Shah from Bolan district said, “I was standing near the police APC when the bomb went off...thankfully there wasn’t much traffic because of Ramazan, otherwise the number of causalities would have been higher.”

Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2017