Imran Khan’s reaction to Bannu jailbreak vs his reaction to D.I.Khan jailbreak
In April 2012, Takfiri terrorists of Taliban and Sipah Sahaba (ASWJ-LeJ) attacked Bannu prison. More than 200 heavily armed Deobandi Taliban militants travelling in several vehicles attacked the Central Jail in Bannu, Southern District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, releasing 384 prisoners in a pre-dawn assault on Sunday, 15 April 2012.
Imran Khan’s reaction to Bannu jailbreak was: “Bannu jail incident again shows total collapse of ANP governance & with it law and order in KP”.
On 29 July 2013, once again Takfiri Deobandi terrorists of Taliban and Sipah Sahaba (ASWJ-LeJ) attacked a prison, this time in D.I.Khan city of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. More than 150 Deobandi terrorist attacked the D.I.Khan prison and were able to secure release of more than 250 terrorists, many of them belonging to Sipah Sahaba / Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The only difference this time was that while in April 2012, ANP ruled the province, in July 2013, it was Imran Khan’s PTI that ruled the KP province.
Imran Khan’s reaction to D.I.Khan jailbreak is: “DIKhan jail break has shown the total failure of prev gov’s intel/sec set up. KP will be strengthening police/setting up strong intel immed. KP police in frontline of fire totally exposed with no tech aids or proper intel. Need to have proper provincial intel-security structures.”
Imran Khan criticized ANP when Bannu jail was attacked. Now he is blaming the Federal government as well as intelligence agenices.
However, this report by Dawn newspaper shows that agencies had informed KPK government about the imminent attack:
Jailbreak: it wasn’t an intelligence failure for once
IF it was for intelligence information, Dera Ismail Khan’s Central Prison debacle should not have happened.
On July 27, a letter marked “secret” and “most immediate” by the country’s intelligence agency addressed to the commissioner, deputy commissioner, deputy inspector general of police, district police officer and the superintendent of Dera Ismail Khan central jail, stated: “It has been reliably learnt that miscreants namely Umer Khitab and his associates affiliated with Gandapur Group/TTP are planning to carry out terrorist attack against Central Jail – Dera Ismail Khan on the pattern similar to Bannu jailbreak in near future. According to information, miscreants are in possession of sketch/map of Jail and have reached in the vicinity of Dera Ismail Khan for this purpose.”
The letter went out the day skirmishes broke out inside the prison between prisoners and guards, which say some security officials, was probably the day the attack could have been launched.
To ensure that the letter reached its destination, properly signed receipts were also obtained from offices of the respective officers mentioned in the letter.
The warning was followed by another demarche to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the following day, on July 28, from the National Crisis Management Cell, Ministry of Interior, Islamabad. The letter marked “secret” and “most immediate” “Threat Alert 699” said: “It has been learnt through reliable source that Umer Khitab, along with TTP elements, are planning to carry out Bannu jailbreak-like attack on Dera Ismail Khan Central Prison and for this purpose, the group has reached the vicinity of Dera Ismail Khan.”
The letter went to the KP Home Secretary, Peshawar, Provincial Police Officer, Additional Chief Secretary Fata, Inspector General of Frontier Corps, Inspector General, Prison, KP and Commandant Frontier Constabulary, KP, Peshawar.
To reinforce the urgency of the matter further, officers were again warned through text messages on Sunday to take appropriate security measures. As a consequence, civil and military officers visited the prison to work out a security plan. The home secretary followed up on the threat.
On July 29, hours before the most audacious attack on the prison located in the middle of a populated area, the Dera commissioner held a conference of all law-enforcement agencies and the civil administration to discuss the issue.
The intelligence was not merely confined to information about gathering of militants in Dera. The administration was warned that militants would be launching a three-pronged attack from Sabzi Mandi, Girls Degree College and Town Hall where they parked their 14 vehicles.
Also, the administration was told that militants might blow up power transmission line to cause a blackout and they were in possession of night vision goggles.
Additionally, they were told that the convergence of hardcore militants in 12-A Barrack inside the prison was a recipe for disaster and that immediate steps be taken for their dispersal. As it happened, 105 jail guards and 75 men from the Frontier Reserve Police (FRP) were least prepared to forestall the ferocious attack with rocket-propelled grenades, time devices, other explosives and heavy firearms.
The attack took place at around 11.30pm and went on till 2am – three hours with one hour inside the jail compound. The militants equipped with megaphones called out names of their brothers-in-faith and broke open their cells with explosive devices, all the while raising slogans of Allah-o-Akbar and TTP Zindabad. Then they went on a slaughtering spree, beheading four inmates, taking away heads of two of them.
In all, by the last count, 248 prisoners have escaped, among them 30 hardcore militants, including Qari Asif and Khalil, the group involved in bombing in Dera Ismail Khan that had left 25 mourners dead on the ninth and tenth of Muharram last year.
Law-enforcement agencies scrambled and the army was called in but what they found in pitched darkness were bodies of the slain prison guards, slaughtered and beheaded inmates, a strong stench of explosives and smouldering lockups. The hundred or so militants, along with a horde of escaped prisoners, melted away amid the ensuing mayhem and confusion. The incident has thus become the biggest jailbreak in Pakistan’s history.
That no lessons were learnt from the Bannu jailbreak hardly comes as a surprise. Pakistanis as a nation, it appears, never learn from history, but what boggles the mind is that the administration would take its time to prepare for an assault which, it thought would come at a time of their choosing, said one official. They were upstaged by militants.
The irony is, according to a senior official, the civil and military authorities had done mock exercises, assigned specific tasks and roles and worked out a clear standard operating procedure of who was to do what. “On paper everything was worked out meticulously to prepare for both day and night assault. It was a video game played out in real time,” the official said.
What seems more bizarre, the minutes of the meeting presided over by the commissioner were properly recorded. “Everybody had taken the threat alert seriously,” the official said.
Light machinegun-mounted armoured personnel carriers and mobiles of the Elite Police force were deployed and guards deployed on rooftops.
But what happened was even more unbelievable. When the attack came, the mobiles disappeared along with the Elite force which was to stop the assault. The district police officer went to seek help from the brigade commander, but neither showed up. “The gun was there, but there was no one to pull the trigger,” an official said.
There was no breach of wall of the prison. The main gate remains intact and the guard manning the gate told investigators that when he saw the militants blowing up the APC and when they approached the gate and ordered him to open it he had no option but to open it. The militants walked in, made announcements on the megaphones and took away their men.
And to cap it all, the statements of the KP chief minister and his hand-picked Information Minister Shaukat Yousafzai that no intelligence was shared with KP on the Dera jail assault were brazenly misleading and untrue. “We could not have been more specific,” said an angry security official. It was incompetence and lack of preparedness, he said.
The answer to Dera jail debacle was not setting up another intelligence agency within the police at a cost of Rs3 billion, as the PTI chairman said on Tuesday as clearly, the intelligence was there. It was a tactical failure.
The Elite Police which had been assigned the task to guard the prison in view of the intelligence did not respond when the attack came. Neither was this an intelligence failure nor coordination failure. It was a failure of nerves and it all boils down to one stark reality: cowardice.
’حملہ آور آرام سے داخل ہوئے اور پہلے روح افزا پیا‘
بی بی سی اردو ڈاٹ کام، پشاور
آخری وقت اشاعت: بدھ 31 جولائ
2013 , 14:45 GMT
پاکستان کے صوبے خیبر پختونخوا کے وزیرِ مال علی امین نے کہا ہے کہ سینٹرل جیل ڈیرہ اسماعیل خان پر ہونے والا حملہ پہلے سے طے شدہ تھا اور جیل میں موجود لوگوں کو پتہ تھا کہ حملہ آور آنے والے ہیں۔
انھوں نے کہا کہ جیسے ہی پہلا فائر ہوا جیل میں موجود قیدیوں نے اپنی تیاری شروع کر دی۔
علی امین کے مطابق ’حملہ آور بہت آرام سے جیل میں گھسے، انھوں نے پہلے روح افزا پیا۔ اس کے بعد انھوں نے کچھ لوگوں کو چن چن کر مارا۔‘
وزیرِ مال علی امین نے بدھ کو ڈیرہ اسماعیل خان کے سینٹرل جیل کا دورہ کیا۔
انہوں نے بتایا ’حملہ آوروں کے پاس سپیکر بھی تھے اور وہ سپیکر پر اعلان کر رہے تھے کہ فلاں فلاں باہر آ جائے اور جب ان کے بندے باہر آتے تو حملہ آور انھیں اسلحہ دیتے اور وہ ان کے ساتھ مل جاتے اور یہ کارروائی تین گھنٹوں تک جاری رہی۔‘
علی امین کے مطابق جیل والوں نے شروع میں تھوڑی بہت مزاحمت کی۔ ’لیکن جیل والوں نے بزدلی دکھائی، انھوں نے حملہ آوروں کے خلاف لڑائی نہیں کی بلکہ یہ لوگ ڈر کر چھپ گئے جس کا ثبوت یہ ہے دہشت گردوں نے شروع میں فائرنگ کر کے پولیس کے پانچ افراد کو ہلاک کر دیا۔‘
ان کا کہنا تھا پولیس کا سپاہی، کوئی تھانے کا ایس ایچ او، ڈیس ایس پی سارے کے سارے کہاں تھے کیونکہ دہشت گرد تین گھنٹوں تک جیل میں گھسے رہے اور پھر وہاں سے چلے گئے۔
علی امین نے کہا صوبائی حکومت واقعے کے ذمہ داروں کو قرار واقعی سزا دے گی کیونکہ یہ سب کے سب سفارش پر بھرتی ہوئے ہیں اور ان کی بھرتی ایم این اے اور ایم پی اے کے کوٹے کے تحت عمل میں آئی اور اسی وجہ سے یہ کام نہیں کر رہے۔ ’یہ لوگ پولیس کی وردی پہنتے ہیں اور عوام کے ٹیکس پر نتخواہ اور مراعات لیتے ہیں۔‘
انھوں نے کہا کہ جیل والوں نے دہشت گردوں کا مقابلہ نہیں کیا بلکہ یہ لوگ حملے کے وقت نالوں میں گھس گئے اور جوابی فائر بھی نہیں کر رہے تھے۔
ایک سوال کہ انٹیلیجنس اداروں نے جیل انتظامیہ کو اس حملے کی پہلے سے باخبر کر دیا تھا کہ اس طرح کا حملہ ہو سکتا ہے کے جواب میں ان کا کہنا تھا کہ یہ بات بالکل صحیح ہے کہ انٹیلیجنس اداروں نے جب یہ خبر دی تو کمشنر نے ایک اجلاس طلب کیا جس میں تمام کمانڈرز موجود تھے۔ ’اس اجلاس کے بعد انھوں نے اگلے دن جیل کو چیک کیا لیکن یہ پتہ نہیں کہ انھوں نے کیا چیک کیا اور کیا اقدامات جاری کیے۔ مگر اس کے باوجود پورا ڈیرہ اسماعیل خان دھماکوں سے گونج رہا تھا۔ ’جیل میں تین گھنٹوں تک دہشت گردوں کی کارروائی جاری رہی۔‘
انھوں نے کہا اس سے پہلے جب بنوں جیل میں حملہ ہوا تو ان کو برطرف کرنے کی بجائے ڈیرہ اسماعیل خان جیل بھیج دیا گیا جس کے بعد انھوں نے یہ کارنامہ انجام دیا۔
http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/pakistan/2013/07/130731_dik_ali_amin_interview_rwa.shtml
پاکستان کے صوبے خیبر پختونخوا کے وزیرِ مال علی امین نے کہا ہے کہ سینٹرل جیل ڈیرہ اسماعیل خان پر ہونے والا حملہ پہلے سے طے شدہ تھا اور جیل میں موجود لوگوں کو پتہ تھا کہ حملہ آور آنے والے ہیں
http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/multimedia/2013/07/130731_ali_amin_iv_rh.shtml
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Faisal Awam Ka: Asma Shirazi – This video shows everyone in DI Khan knew Taliban were doing a jail break. Army, police and govt silently stood by for four hours while Taliban-ASWJ terrorists successfully secured their friends from D.I. Khan jail.
Faisla Awam Ka – 30th July 2013 by zemvideos
…no amount of training or weapons and facilities can bolster the morale of law-enforcement agencies, especially if it has nosedived the way it has in Pakistan. The fact of the matter is that what the police need is assurance that the governments will fight terrorism and not make compromises. Through the years, the police have lost hundreds of good men because successive governments didn’t have the will to fight. Be it Karachi or Jhang, men got sacrificed at the altar of pragmatism. Men remember how, for example, Malik Ishaq got numerous witnesses, including a senior police officer killed because no one was willing to move against him and the police had no real protection. Allegedly, the officer, who killed one LeJ terrorist leader, Riaz Basra, cut a deal with the government and settled abroad after he had done the job. Interestingly, in Basra’s case, the higher officials used the sectarian card to finally get their man.
We also know that there is sufficient infiltration of jihadi networks in the police department and security establishment. There are senior police officers in Punjab (serving and retired) who go around fixing appointments for Hafiz Saeed and other militant leaders. The question is, how will NACTA deal with this? It is important to build professionalism as a capacity where law enforcers are ready to protect the state and its citizens irrespective of their cast, sect, gender or ethnicity.
A clean and professional police force is as critical for counter-terrorism as a professional judiciary. I have spoken with judges from lower courts who were extremely bigoted in their thinking. But then there is the fear factor due to which judges will not touch militants. Thus, the anti-terror court judge who convicted Malik Ishaq fled the country like the one who sentenced Salmaan Taseer’s murderer to death. This is not just about providing protection to a judge as long as he/she is there but to their family as well, and even after they are not hearing a particular case. All of this will cost money.
At a time when all state institutions are experiencing a meltdown due to their acute politicisation and weakening of the state, building capacity is not just about acquiring modern tools. A law enforcement set-up that takes sides and is ideologically motivated is extremely dangerous. NACTA would probably benefit from making a short-term versus a long-term strategy to deal with the problem. As it builds the will, professionalises and ideologically neutralises law enforcement and the judiciary, there should also be a plan of who will deal with militancy in the short term.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 1st, 2013.
Dr Ayesha Siddiqa
http://tribune.com.pk/story/584641/countering-terrorism-2/
The time has arrived when arm and othe law enforcement agencies will salute to TTP. It was fixed plan, can you imagine how easily it all had happened. TTP were given clue from the district management and local authorities to acheive their goal on that night. Now they are saying that police officer will be fired. How about those inmates who lost their lives by the hands of these TTP animals. I could say that Jamat-e-Islami and TI both were paid a handsome amount from their masters TTP. Nobody will be punished you watch my word. Rather they will be awarded secretly. Injustice can not go for long. Allah will bring his Azab on these animals and their supporters, insha’allah.
@salman Farooqi:
Agreed,
Not only district management but the leading pakistani media is also involved, otherwise they will certainly exposed the names of inmates who have been killed by assailants,
I myself visited DI Khan several times, and every time we had to go through multiple security check posts and bound to show identity and search about our belongings. Then how is it possible for more than 100 terrorist to attack this jail without any fear?
Where our army could not react timely?
Why the operation lasted for four hours without any fear?
” SHREEK-A-JURM NA HOTE TTO MUKHBARI KARTE” CHURCHCILL SAID IF YOU THINK YOU ARE IN HELL, KEEP GOING
All i can say is time has come for imran khan to read the writing on the wall and start dealing with these deranged serial killers seriously. what is this bullshit of negotiating with them. he should get the british to come and train the police and law enforcement agencies to fight terrorists. they have a lot of experience in dealing with the IRA. imran should make sure his security force will be protected and these TTP guys should not be taken prisoners. just kill them.