Questions About Thursday’s Attack

The exact number of people involved in the attack on Thursday has yet to be established, but a police official told this newspaper that there might have been more than eight people.

Another newspaper quoted a "source" involved in the investigation of the attack on the convoy of the commander V corps, Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, as saying that there could have been as many as 10 people.

It has now been established that the van used by the attackers and found abandoned near Defence View, which straddles the expressway connecting Korangi Road and Defence with Sharea Faisal, was stolen around two hours before the ambush happened.

At ten past nine, when the attack is reported to have taken place, the main Clifton Road is quite full with morning rush-hour traffic, especially people heading towards Saddar and the main business district of I. I. Chundrigar Road. The firing went on for several minutes.

A resident of Mohammad Ali Bogra Road said that it lasted for around four or five minutes, which seems a long time. The authorities have said that the abandoned van had blood stains on it which meant that some of the attackers were injured.

In fact, in response to a question asking whether the military authorities had "evaluated" the response of the guards accompanying the corps commander, ISPR DG Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said on a TV programme that at least some of the attackers had been injured but that they managed to take the injured or the bodies of their comrades with them.

The distance from the Clifton Bridge area to Defence View must be between five to seven kilometres, depending on the route taken. A van, especially one with its windows shattered by bullets (as pictures of the abandoned vehicle show), could not have been that difficult to miss provided that someone in the police or the military had radioed a message asking units to set up barriers on all major roads and look for the suspected vehicle.

Even if the law-enforcement agencies did not know where the attackers would be going to abandon their get-away vehicle, they could have positioned pickets on Khayaban-i-Roomi, Sunset Boulevard, Sharea Faisal and so on.

When the car was initially stolen in the morning, a message was aired on police control around two hours before the attack happened. Despite that, the vehicle was in an apparently high- security zone with several members of the law-enforcement agencies all within walking and viewing distance.

In several recent incidents in Karachi, the vehicles used have all been hijacked in the first half of the day, in fact usually during the morning, and used later in the day for attacks. This might point to a pattern which the police and other law-enforcement agencies should have discerned and taken pre-emptive measure to deal with.

Hence, the question that when the city is said to be on high alert, the theft by armed persons (the driver of the stolen vehicle has said that he noticed the men were carrying automatic weapons, that two were in police uniform and that they warned him not to tell the police, which he did and hence the airing of the message on police control) of the van should have rung alarms bells and the police should have been in a battle-ready position to effect a ’clamp-down’ and increased checking of vehicles.

The other question, of course, has to do with how in the world does a bullet-riddled van full of armed assassins get away so easily in rush-hour traffic.