Terrorists attack Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital: It must be CIA, Mossad, RAW, Black Water, Khad, anyone but our dear Taliban
At least twelve people have been killed and 10 injured as suspected militants launched a brazen attack on Jinnah Hospital in Lahore late Monday night. Terrorists entered hospital premises in camouflage of police uniform. Five of the dead are police officers. The militant captured from Friday’s attack on the Ahmadi community’s place of worship was admitted to the intense care ward of the Jinnah hospital. Also many of those injured in Friday’s attack on Ahmadis are undergoing treatment in the hospital. Analysts suggest that this could be the prime motive behind the attack on the hospital.
The follow up to Fridays’ Lahore Ahmedi massacre, now madness has shifted its guns on the survivors of this tragedy. So far 12 people have been slaughtered. Now camel has entered the tent, no escape. Our beloved independent media, has given enough benefit of doubt to our dear murderers. These poor butchers after every successful carnage project yelled at the top of their lungs to get credit for their triumphant episode. Our independent media analysts and religous leaders always tried to snatch away their success by pointing finger to the Jewish, Indian, American and Black Water agencies.
This always upset our beloved butchers, and these poor guys had to do a fresh killing spree on the hope that some day our media will give them the credit for this. So owing to the similar reasoning they are busy again in the Jinnah hospital of Lahore, at the time of this write-up. Hopefully our media does justice to them this time and give them their long deserved credit for all the efforts they have so far put in.
Enjoy the new Pakistan guys. Have fun. You asked for it.
sab govt krwa rahi hai ……………………khuda in ko garaat krey
Exactly !! Sub Government Karwa rahi ahi. Punjab Government!!
@Usama Bhutto Good one!
Schools, houses of worship, hospitals – is not place off-limits to the Taliban? Has all moral sensibility left these people? Do they reflect even for a second, do they have maybe a little doubt, about what they’re doing?
Hospital attack
Dawn Editorial
Wednesday, 02 Jun, 2010
Pakistani policemen search a hospital following the gunmen attack at the Jinnah Hospital in Lahore on June 1, 2010. Gunmen opened fire at a Pakistan hospital where victims of attacks on Ahmadi mosques were being treated late May 31, killing 12 people in a shootout with security forces, a doctor said. The attackers stormed the gate of Jinnah Hospital in the eastern city of Lahore, where at least 30 victims and one of the alleged attackers in Friday’s suicide, gun and grenade attack on the minority sect were being treated. – AFP
Yes, the gunmen were the ones who pulled the trigger and murdered innocent civilians and police officials at Jinnah Hospital, Lahore on Monday night — but the local and provincial administration must share the blame for the attack happening in the first place. The fact that one of the gunmen in last week’s attacks on Ahmadis was injured and being treated at the hospital was openly stated by police and administration officials. This was a monumental error of judgment.
There was simply no reason whatsoever for officials to let on that they were treating one of the gunmen at a particular hospital, other than to try and brag about some moderate ‘success’ in the wake of overwhelming failure last Friday. It should have been obvious that the gunman’s accomplices may come back for him. The fact that he was in a hospital was no deterrent; hospitals have been attacked before by militants. And, at the very least, concerns about the safety of other patients and visitors at the hospital should have been uppermost in the minds of Lahore’s officialdom. Instead, a hospital was made a target by a shocking lapse of judgment.
The original mistake was then compounded by not providing enough security, either for the hospital or the suspect under custody. There are only so many hospitals in Lahore, and fewer still where there is any possibility of treating a militant. Surely by now the Lahore police ought to have developed standard operating procedures for dealing with such situations. The police are pointing to the fact that the ‘raid’ was not successful and that the suspect is still in custody. But reports suggest that the man suffered a gunshot wound on Monday night, indicating the fighting got very close to the area in which he was being treated. And if there had been proper security, the attackers should not have been allowed to get away. It’s not enough to claim that a ‘rarely used’ path was used to access the hospital or that the gunmen took advantage of the pandemonium to make good their escape. An attack on a hospital as large as Jinnah would inevitably send people scampering in every direction — the police should have prepared for this eventuality, as indeed they should have prepared for the possibility of a sophisticated attack being launched.
The colossal frustration here is that after each attack, obvious, thoroughly predictable, mistakes are exposed. It’s one thing to accept that not every attack can be thwarted; it’s quite another to ask the people of Lahore to accept that the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/21-hospital-attack-260-sk-02
Punjab ignoring CID report on terror groups By Nasir Jamal and Shakeel Ahmed Wednesday, 02 Jun, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/punjab-ignoring-cid-report-on-terror-groups-260
LAHORE: The Shahbaz Sharif government appears to be reluctant to take action against the banned sectarian and Jihadi organisations operating in Punjab in spite of evidence that these may have been involved in many terrorist attacks in the province recently and may have strong links with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
The Sharif government’s unwillingness to deal with the growing menace of terrorism in the province, including its southern districts, is in defiance of the evaluation by its own counter-terrorism agencies. A recent secret document based on data collected in south Punjab finds that a number of banned groups are carrying out a “sustained drive” to recruit fresh cadre from among the “poverty stricken, illiterate and unemployed” youth in the region.
‘Terrorists active’
Interior Minister Rehman Malik says that terrorists taking refuge in southern Punjab were “now active” to “destabilise the country after the defeat of the Taliban in Fata”. “They — Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Jaish-i-Mohammad (JM) — are allies of the Taliban and Al Qaeda…,” he was quoted to have said.
The minister also hinted at an operation in south Punjab on the pattern of the one carried out in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) “because nearly 700 out of the more than 1,700 people with suspected links with the banned terrorist and sectarian outfits belonged to southern Punjab”.
“Army operations are required only where there are no-go areas and there is no such situation in any part of Punjab,” Rana Sanaullah, Punjab Law Minister and a trusted aide of Shahbaz Sharif, rebuffed the interior minister. The provincial minister, who attracted wide criticism for hobnobbing with the leader of the banned SSP’s during an election campaign in Jhang a couple of months ago, dubbed Mr Malik’s statement an attempt to destabilise the province (and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government).
Rana Sanaullah has rejected demands for an operation in south Punjab, but promises to bring to justice those involved in terrorist activities like the ones that took place in Lahore during the last four days.
List of suspects
Talking to Dawn, police officials of Dera Ghazi Khan and Multan expressed their ignorance of the list of people suspected of their links with the banned sectarian and Jihadi organisations as mentioned by Mr Malik.
Regional Police Officer of Dera Ghazi Khan Ahmed Mubarrak said police had no idea of the list of the members of the banned organisations like JM and LJ in south Punjab. “Right now the police are only watching the activities of people placed in the fourth schedule rather than seeking any information about the people the (federal) minister has spoken of,” he added.
RPO of Multan Arif Ikram said the police were watching and provided figures to back his assertion: there are 275 people placed on the fourth schedule in the Multan region, besides 380 who came back from Jihad in Afghanistan.
Mr Ikram, however, conceded that an integrated system bringing together various agencies was needed to enable the police to come up with the right picture about the potential terrorists’ activities. The federal government, he observed, was being assisted by different secret agencies while the police, being run by the province, had limited resources at its command, depending largely on its CID wing. Owing to this the federal government may have more information about such elements as compared to the police, he said. He spoke of a new system that the government was introducing for the monitoring of Madressahs but didn’t elaborate what this system would entail.
A senior police official in Lahore says the government is preparing its strategy to deal with terrorism but he could not discuss it with media. “But let me tell you one thing: the involvement of some people from south Punjab in terrorist attacks does not mean that this region has become a hub of Taliban,” he said. “Far from it; there are no training centres in this region. The terrorist networks are spread across the country. Only some terrorists belong to this part of the country. Some, as in case of Abdullah, a terrorist arrested from Lahore for attacking the Qadianis, had left this part years ago and settled elsewhere,” he said.
A secret report – Talibanisation in Southern Punjab – by the Crime Investigation Department (CID) acknowledges that “the terrorist activities that have taken place in Punjab in the past couple of years invariably prove direct/indirect links with activists’ ex-proscribed organisations. This phenomenon does not qualify as spread of Talibanisation in society”.
State of denial
The question then is: Is the PML-N government waiting for a ‘standard’ Talibanisation of the area to start before it moves to control the situation?
“The Punjab government is living in a state of denial. It should first admit that the groups carrying out terrorist activities (in the province) are there and operating out of south Punjab before it can take action against them and protect people from them,” defence and political analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi told Dawn on Tuesday.
He regretted that the Shahbaz Sharif government was pursuing a policy of ‘reaction’ rather than ‘action’ (against terrorists). Even if reaction is what the Punjab government must restrict itself to, doesn’t it have enough proof of a simmering situation in the south to react to? Surely, only action now can prevent a full-blown operation in future.
As is pointed out in the secret report quoted above, groups and organisations like SSP and JM and their breakaway factions like LJ and Jamaatul Furqan are quite active in southern districts of Punjab.
“Most analyses have acknowledged the presence of strong sympathies for Jihadi and sectarian elements in south Punjab,” a publicity-shy Islamabad-based security analyst said.
Until a few years back, according to him, the militant groups operating out of south Punjab and elsewhere in the province and the Taliban from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had different agenda and focus. “But the Musharraf government’s action against the sectarian Punjabi outfits and reduction in intensity of Jihad in Kashmir under the US pressure led them to seek refuge in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and obtain financial assistance and training from the TTP. That was the beginning of their joint operations within the country,” he said.
A police official in Lahore said the police were “alert to the threat and doing our best to control it”.
Right now, the people of Shahabz Sharif’s Lahore would be entitled to say that the police’s best is not quite good enough.
Jamat-e-Islami activist doctor involved in Ahmadi massacre:
ISI link doctor to Jinnah Hospital attack
By Abdul Manan
July 17, 2010
Members of the Ahmadiyya community listen to a sermon during Friday prayers at their worship place in Garhi Shahu, Lahore. This was one of…
LAHORE: The Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) have picked up a doctor in connection with the May 31 attack on the Jinnah Hospital after “a thorough surveillance lasting over a month and a half” on July 10, officials in the agency have told The Express Tribune.
However, Dr Abdullah’s parents and colleagues dismiss the assertions and rule out his involvement in the terrorist attack. They say they will hold a press conference at the Lahore Press Club on July 17 to chalk out a strategy for his release.
Intelligence officials said that the ISI men had started monitoring doctors who they suspected might have facilitated the terrorists who attacked the hospital in a bid to free or kill a suspect named Moaz, who was injured during the May 28 attack on the Ahmadis’ places of worship in Model Town.
The sources said that Abdullah was the first one to send a bouquet to the injured suspect on May 30 while he was still recuperating in the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU).
Despite Abdullah being a junior doctor, they said, he gained access to the terrorist inside the ICU because of his alleged connections with the Islami Jamiat-e-Taleba (IJT) and the Jamaatud Dawa, which is a banned group.
According to the intelligence officials, six members of the Ahmadiya community, who were admitted to the surgical ward unit 2 of the hospital, indicated that they were not being given proper medical care and said that doctors’ negligence had caused some patients’ injuries to deteriorate.
During their surveillance, they said that they found that two of the doctors in surgical ward’s unit 2 had a close relationship with Dr Ali Abdullah, who “visited the Ahmadis’ ward several times a day despite working in a different ward”. He often “helped” his fellow doctors, prescribing medicines for the Ahmadi victims. A serving deputy inspector-general of police, who belongs to the Ahmadiya community, is also said to have alerted the ISI about the “suspicious movements of Dr Abdullah”. He is also said to have filed his own findings based on information gathered by provincial level intelligence operatives.
Dr Abdullah, sources said, was picked up on Saturday afternoon and by Monday, he was transferred to Islamabad for further questioning.
A local office-bearer of the Ahmadiya community, Nasrullah Baloch, confirmed that the condition of some of the injured community members had deteriorated in the Jinnah Hospital’s ICU. He said that they were now being treated at another private hospital.
Investigation SP of the Model Town Division Abdul Rab said that they were investigating about the missing doctor from all angles, adding that they had also questioned some of the relatives of Dr Abdullah in a bid to establish the extent of his links with the terrorists. He said that despite his being a doctor, his links with terrorists could not be ruled out.
Dr Sarfaraz, the suspect doctor’s father, who is also an additional medical superintendent of the Services Hospital told The Express Tribune that his son might have been detained because of his “ties with the IJT”, adding that his son might even have been killed.
Reaffirming his political affiliation with the Jamaat-e-Islami, he said that although his son had served as an IJT Nazim when he was a studying in the Allama Iqbal Medical College in Lahore, he could not have been involved in abetting terrorists who attacked Jinnah Hospital. “It is not a crime to be affiliated with a religious political organisation.”
According to Dr Sarfaraz, his bearded 24-year-old son had been missing since July 10, adding that he had lodged an FIR with the Garden Town police station on July 11.
He said that a number of doctors had assured him that they would “paralyse hospitals across the province”. He said that the doctors had assured him that when they could “force the UAE government to release Dr Ayaz, our own government will not be able to sustain such protests for more than a week”.
Dr Ayaz was picked up by a US intelligence agency from Ras al Khaimah in the UAE on suspicion of having ties with al Qaeda. The detained doctor was freed after 64 days in custody after doctors in the UAE and Pakistan launched a concerted protest campaign.
The spokesman for the Jinnah Hospital told The Express Tribune that Dr Abdullah had been working in the hospital as the house officer in the surgical ward’s unit 1 for the past three months. He said that there was no doubt that Dr Abdullah was a “hardcore IJT activist, but he simply cannot be involved in facilitating the attackers”.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 17th, 2010.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/28410/isi-link-doctor-to-jinnah-hospital-attack/