Tributes to martyrs
Tributes to martyrs
Editorial
Editorial

The nation will be paying glowing tributes to the martyrs of August 8 who sacrificed their lives for rule of law and human dignity.

The nation will be paying glowing tributes to the martyrs of August 8 who sacrificed their lives for rule of law and human dignity.

The incident took place at the Civil Hospital, Quetta, where a suicide bomber attacked the innocent people, overwhelmingly lawyers and their associates when they gathered to take the dead body of a leading lawyer, Bilal Anwer Kasi, who was targeted and killed by a terrorist or a group of trained terrorists.

Bilal Kasi was ambushed and killed when he came out of his residence and on his way to the courts. The terrorist pumped in 10 bullets into his body from a very close range ensuring his instant death and later on fled. The body was taken to Civil Hospital where a post-mortem report was secured and body was handed over to the heirs of the deceased lawyer.

Since he was a very popular lawyer and active in the community and in the legal profession, a larger number of people rushed to Civil Hospital to enquire about the incidents.

The terrorists probably selected him to attract a larger number of lawyers for killing. Almost all the prominent and leading lawyers were at the civil hospital besides close relatives of the deceased during which the waiting suicide bomber struck and killed dozens of people on the spot.

There is no precedence in the entire history of terrorism in Pakistan that lawyers were ever targeted by the terrorists. It was an unprecedented attack on the lawyers’ community which had no parallel in the history of terrorism in Pakistan. The terrorists always targeted the members of the law enforcing agencies and their personnel in group or in single target.

But they never attacked the lawyers, barring a terror attack on local court in Quetta years ago. Why the lawyers’ community was made the target first killing a leading lawyer in an ambush and later on the crowd gathered to collect the body? Most of the relatives of deceased lawyers claim that they were real champions of supremacy of law and construction and they remained on the forefront in defending the inalienable human rights of the innocent people.

Score of promising lawyers or future members of judiciary were made the target for suicide attack at the Civil Hospital. Among them were top and leading legal minds of Balochistan killed in the attack.

It seems that it was preplanned that first they killed the leading lawyer and later allowed sometime to gather more and more people, including the leading lawyers, and then the suicide attack was carried out on them ensuring maximum number of death and maimed more and more persons.

The more intriguing part of the story is that a large number of people were killed and many more injured seriously, as the establishment, in order to get cheap publicity, organized VVIP visits to the Hospital disrupting the rescue and relief operation diverting the attention of the Hospital administration, including the doctors, to attend the VVIPs who paid the most unwanted visit to the hospital at the time of crisis.

A sizable number of injured people died merely because they could not get timely first-aid. Excessive bleeding was the main cause of the death of a larger number of people merely because the rescue and relief operation disrupted due to unscheduled VVIP visits to the Hospital.

Yet another factor was that a scare was created in the Hospital that chased away the doctors on fear of yet another suicide attack. It was mere rumour-mongering or part of deliberate scare campaign that increased the number of death manifold. When there was complete disorder at the Civil Hospital, some of the injured were shifted to CMH where relatives, friends and well wishers were barred from donating much needed blood to the victims of terrorism.

The relatives experienced difficulty in convincing the security officials about the emergency of the situation and they wanted to donate blood to the injured. It is one of the biggest man-made disaster in Balochistan history in which its leading sons lost their precious lives.