A New Kind of Terror

While a lot is being written on the recent Karachi violence and riots and the burning alive of 7 people in Tahir Plaza close to the city courts which housed several private lawyers’ offices, the manner in which this incident took place is very disturbing. Few newspapers have given enough details and eye-witness accounts except to state that it seemed to be planned in advance.

There are varying reports but apparently, and as reported in Dawn, on April9 scores of young men on motorcycles arrived at Tahir Plaza and started roughing up the people in a small eating place on the ground floor of the Plaza to create panic. Then they went up the building and started locking the offices on the various floors from outside. The important thing to note is that they had brought with them large number of China-made padlocks to lock the doors and grilles on the floors, which means that the attack must have been planned well in advance. They were also carrying sacks containing a large quantity of highly-inflammable powder, which was thrown into the rooms and offices through the windows after smashing their glass once all the doors/exits were sealed. A burning match tossed into the room right after was enough to ignite a full-blown fire and ensure no one could get out alive. After having thoroughly gutted the building the armed men resorted to firing in the air to create more panic and made their escape.

Seven innocent people, including a woman, were burnt beyond recognition in the ensuing fire.

Till now we have heard of mob attacks, armed youth, targetted killings, torching, arson and sabotage, but this seems to be yet a new kind of terror that Karachi’ites will be facing from now on.

May God help us.

The Year of the Boot?

These were scenes straight out of some 1990s Bollywood movie in which towards the end of the show the junta (public) comes out on the streets to take matters into its own hands and beats the hell out of the bad guys. Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim, ex Chief Minister of Sindh under Musharraf rule, was a very frightened man on Monday, trying to run for his life and escape from the clutches – and shoes – of the mob that was trying to get their hands on him outside the Sindh Assembly in Karachi.

The scene in which somebody succeeds in hitting him hard on his face with a shoe has been shown countless times by all TV channels. This was after he had taken oath as MPA inside the assembly hall where someone else also threw a shoe at him (and missed) from the visitors’ gallery.

Later when someone interviewed a couple of women MPAs, instead of condemning the incident they started lamenting that they had not managed to get their own hands (read shoes) on him!

To give the devil his due, Arbab Rahim during his tenure as Chief Minister had been very vocal about his hatred for and criticism of Benazir Bhutto, had accused her of corruption and even went as far as to say that from a religious point of view the “leadership of a woman – and therefore BB – is a curse!” All this obviously seems not to have gone down well with the public.

Then the mob-and-shoe nightmare continued yesterday, this time in Lahore, with Sher Afgan Niazi being the target when he was visiting his lawyer’s office – in this case the mob supposedly comprised of lawyers from the ongoing lawyers’ movement. Niazi, also an ex-minister of the Kings party, had been a very vocal critic of the movement aimed at restoring the judges suspended by Musharraf in Nov 2007. 

He was confined in his lawyer’s office for a good many hours before Aitzaz Ahsan, President of the Supreme Court Bar Association and a leading figure of the movement reached the spot to assist in getting him out to safety. Niazi managed to make it, however not before being severely punched, manhandled and “shoe-d” by the crowd on his way into the ambulance that had come to his rescue.