JEDDAH, 20 October 2007 — The face of Karachi, abuzz with activity and gaiety a day earlier to mark the return of former Premier Benazir Bhutto, changed overnight following the deadly twin blasts that turned Benazir’s homecoming bloody in minutes.
Yesterday Karachi was mourning the death of innocent residents. Educational institutions remained closed and exams scheduled for yesterday were postponed.
“The city is sad, people are mourning what happened in the night...it’s a huge loss,” said a survivor of the blasts.
Bemused survivors recounted the tale of horror and destruction left by the explosions.
Sehar Kamran, director of Pakistan International School, Jeddah’s (English Section), who accompanied Benazir from Dubai to Karachi on Thursday, relived the horror. Sehar, who suffered deep cuts to her left leg, bruises on arms and possible fracture to her collar bone, said one moment there was joy and gaiety on the streets of Karachi, the next there was panic and mayhem as the bombs exploded near the truck carrying Benazir and the party leaders.
“Thousands had come to Karachi to show their solidarity with Benazir. The port city was decorated with green, red and black flags of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to welcome its chairperson. The whole atmosphere wore a festive look, people were dancing and cheering their leader. In the midst of these celebrations everybody forgot that there are people in the country who were not happy with this march toward democracy. And then tragedy struck at midnight, turning Benazir’s jubilant homecoming parade into a scene of blood and carnage, ripping victims apart and hurling a fireball into the sky.”
Sehar said Benazir miraculously escaped injuries and possible death because she had only moments earlier got into her slow-moving armored plated truck, which was part of a winding convoy of cars, vans and motorcycles of cheering PPP activists. Sehar said when the first blast took place nobody realized for a moment that terror had struck. But suddenly, “I saw people running in all directions and then I realized what had happened.”
We were putting some of the injured onto our van when there was another huge blast and this time human parts flew to all parts, she said. “The aftershock was so devastating that all of us were thrown out of the van, then panic ensued as we started running for our lives. We stumbled over debris and dead bodies,” she said.
Another survivor, PPP leader Yousuf Raza Gilani said. “There was a big bang and a huge fireball.” And then, almost immediately, there were a number of bodies lying all over the place.
Body parts littered the road, where a while ago the former premier had been mobbed by tens of thousands of supporters. There were pools of blood next to the burned out husks of destroyed police cars.
“I met Benazir after the blast,” said Gilani. “She is an iron lady — but saddened by the deaths of innocent people.”
“I couldn’t understand what happened,” a witness Mazhar Bukhari of DM Digital, said. “I took five or six bodies to the ambulances. But there were still more people lying on the ground, and there were body parts all over on the ground.”
As the first bomb exploded, panic erupted. “Suddenly there was another huge blast and we fell on each other,” said Benazir’s spokesman and former chief of Federal Investigating Agency (FIA) Rahman Malik.
“I saw everything was burning outside and then there was another blast. I heard someone shouting ‘evacuate, evacuate!’ And then there was blood all around,” Malik said.
It looked like a suicide attack. At the time the jammers were not working so you cannot rule out the possibility of a timer device being used to kill people, Malik said.
Hospitals in the city was receiving dozens of injured and bodies of those who died. Minivans and ambulances arrived loaded with the wounded.
Some wounded children were lying on the floor at one hospital, with friends holding up drips for them because of a lack of space.
