Families identify victims of Pakistan attack

QUETTA: Weeping relatives gathered yesterday to identify the charred remains of loved ones killed in a double attack in Pakistan’s troubled southwest claimed by a banned Sunni militant group.
At least 25 people were killed on Saturday when militants blew up a bus carrying female students in Quetta, capital of restive Baluchistan province, and then stormed a hospital where survivors had been taken for treatment.
The extremist sectarian outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), responsible for a string of outrages against Pakistan’s Shiite Muslim minority, said it was behind both attacks.
An LeJ spokesman said a female suicide bomber struck the bus — a rare tactic in Pakistan — before gunmen attacked the hospital, claiming the strikes were revenge for an operation by security forces earlier this month.
Militants occupied parts of the Bolan Medical Complex in a standoff that lasted several hours and ended when security forces stormed the building, freeing 35 hostages.
Authorities shut down the hospital yesterday, moving patients to another facility, as investigators combed the grisly aftermath of the violence.
“All patients were shifted from here overnight. Inside I have seen blood and small pieces of human flesh,” a security official at the locked gates said.
The intensity of the blast and subsequent fire reduced the student bus to a blackened skeleton, and outside the mortuary of the Provincial Sandeman Hospital yesterday, weeping relatives gathered to identify bodies amid a strong stench of burnt human flesh.
The state of the bodies added confusion to the relatives’ burden of grief as some were given contradictory information about their loved ones.
Mohammad Hamza, 19, said that on Saturday he had been given the body of his student sister, only to be told a mistake had been made.
“I came here after someone had given us the information that we had taken the wrong body and my sister’s body was still here at hospital, but it is not true,” Hamza said. It appeared the body he was given on Saturday was indeed his sister.
Mohammad Yasir, deputy registrar of Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University, said DNA testing may be needed to identify many body parts.
A witness caught in the hospital during the shootout described hiding during the terrifying ordeal.
“The firing was so intense that I thought that my time (to die) has come and I started reciting verses from the Holy Qu’ran,” Ali Gul, 35, said.
“Some patients cried and begged the gunmen to spare them. The gunmen told them to keep quiet and said they were only killing security forces.” LeJ spokesman Abubakar Siddiq called newspaper offices in Quetta late Saturday to claim the killings, saying the attacks were retaliation for a raid by security forces.

Anti-polio workers shot dead
In Peshawar, gunmen killed two anti-polio workers yesterday in northwest Pakistan, police said, the latest violence directed at efforts to eradicate the disease from the country.
The two attackers shot the two Pakistani health workers while they were on a vaccination drive in rural Kandar village, said Swabi District Police Chief Mohammad Saeed. The gunmen arrived on foot and later disappeared, he added.
No one claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack. But some Pakistani militant groups oppose the vaccinations and accuse the workers of spying for Washington. They point out the case of a Pakistani doctor used by the CIA to collect blood samples of the family of Osama Bin Laden in order to track him down and kill him in Pakistan in 2011.
Pakistan is one of the world’s three remaining countries, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, still affected by the polio virus. As many as 58 cases were reported here in 2012, down from 198 in 2011.
The World Health Organization said in late March that some 240,000 children have missed UN-backed vaccinations against polio because of security concerns in Pakistan’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan. It said the health workers have not been able to immunize children in the North and South Waziristan regions — Taleban strongholds — since July 2012.