Thursday, December 5, 2002
Terror still stalks Pakistan: Karachi Police chief
Agence France-Presse Karachi, December 5
The overnight bombing and slaying of three Pakistanis at a European consulate here show that terrorists can still strike foreign targets with ease in this violence-wracked port city, police warned on Thursday. "One thing is clear: this message clearly indicates that terrorists can walk into any consulate to achieve their targets," Karachi police chief Kamal Shah said as he surveyed the shattered Macedonian consulate in Karachi's plush defence district.
The two-storey bungalow used by Macedonia's honorary consul general, Pakistani national Bilal Qureshi, was blown up at 1:00 am. The ceiling of the main office caved in from the force of the blast, and the bungalow's windows were blown out.
The office had been closed since 4:00 pm (local time) on Wednesday. But lying inside the shattered main chamber were three corpses -- their throats slit and their hands and legs tied. One man was the Pakistani security guard, a Christian. The other two, a Pakistani man and woman, were unidentified.
Written on the wall was a grim poem, under the heading "Message for Infidels (non-Muslims)":
"Force will be met with force and compassion with compassion. We are people like you and will do what you do," it said, according to a police intelligence officer who inspected the scene.
"This incident shows that terrorists are very much alive and looking for soft targets which are not very well protected," an Islamabad-based intelligence official said.
"They targeted this place as they knew it was not well protected. There was just one guard."
Since Pakistan abandoned the Taliban in September last year and signed up to the US-led campaign to crush them and their Al-Qaeda guests in neighbouring Afghanistan, Islamic terrorists have unleashed a swathe of bloody revenge attacks on Christian and Western targets.
Sixty-six people, mainly Pakistani Muslims, have died in eight of the attacks, including two suicide car-bomb attacks on a bus carrying French nationals in May and on the US consulate in June.
Hotels, foreign missions and offices, schools, churches and mosques across Pakistan have been fortified most of the year with barricades, bomb detectors, and cordons of police, while checkpoints and car searches dominate the streets of Karachi and the capital Islamabad.
Police and officials have linked Thursday's strike to the deaths of six Pakistanis in Macedonia earlier this year.
They were believed to be part of a group of seven suspected terrorists who were shot dead by Macedonian police in March on suspicion of plotting attacks on Western embassies in the capital Skopje.
Karachi-based human rights activist Ansar Burney said the six were executed after being falsely identified as terrorists. Their bodies were flown back to Pakistan in September.
Karachi authorities have deployed thousands of police, anti-terrorist commandos and paramilitaries around the city, especially at marketplaces packed with shoppers preparing for the Eid festival marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
But despite the maximum security alert issued to police and paramilitaries across the country, shoppers were still clamouring to buy goods for the Eid festival.
"Blasts, killings and festivity is now part of city life," said housewife Nasreen Chandio, shopping for shoes with her two children. "Life and death are in the hands of God, so why are we scared?"
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