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Blasts amid Pakistan security session

Nirupama Subramanian

ISI chief briefs MPs on internal security threat

— Photo: AP

Roping in locals: Paramilitary forces and tribesmen patrol the troubled area of Daudzai near Peshawar on Thursday.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s parliamentarians met on Thursday for a second day of an extraordinary joint session to discuss the deteriorating security situation, with a suicide attack on the capital’s police and another attack in the North-West Frontier Province that claimed the lives of nine people underlining the reality of the challenge.

The session was underway when a suicide attack on a police training school on the outskirts of the capital left 10 policemen injured.

A car drove into the training school and parked outside the building housing anti-terrorist police personnel, where a man got out of the vehicle and went inside to deliver two boxes of sweets.

An explosion at that moment tore off a large portion of the three-storeyed building. The capital’s senior-most police official, Inspector-General Raza Asghar Gardezi, said there were few casualties and no fatalities because the policemen who would have normally been in the building were deployed in the area around Parliament for the high-security joint session.

A crater at the site indicated that the car may have carried the explosives. It is not clear what happened to the man who got off the car. Mr. Gardezi said body parts were found at the site, and police were investigating the possibility that the man might have been a suicide bomber.

With security in the capital at its tightest, the attack exposed the inadequacy of the security measures employed by law enforcers and the ability of those behind these attacks to strike at will.

As parliamentarians of the National Assembly and the Senate congregated at the parliament buildings for the second day of the session, Army and paramilitaries helped the police to seal all roads to Parliament and to man checkpoints. Helicopters hovered low in the sky on surveillance missions.

Security bubble

Just 10 km away from this high-security bubble, a vehicle carrying explosives was waved into the police training school. Mr. Gardezi said it had yet to be established how the car had been allowed inside despite blanket security instructions that no vehicle could enter the premises.

On a violence-filled day, at least nine people were killed in an attack in the Upper Dir district of the North-West Frontier Province by a roadside bomb that went off near a prison van and a school bus.

Four of the dead were schoolgirls

On Wednesday, parliamentarians were briefed by the Inter-Services Intelligence Director-General designate Lt. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha on the internal security threats from Taliban militancy in the North-West and in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

According to reports, the parliamentarians also saw grisly videos of the methods employed by the militants against captured soldiers. Lt. Gen. Pasha also apprised the parliamentarians of the military operations there.

Some reports said Lt. Gen. Pasha also spoke of “foreign” hands stoking trouble in Balochistan.

Among those present at the briefing were Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the four provincial Governors, the four Chief Ministers aside, and PML(N) leader Nawaz Sharif, who is not an MP but was asked to attend the session as a special invitee.

Dissatisfaction

The Jamat-i-Islami and the Paksitan Tehreek-i-Insaf, headed by former cricket star Imran Khan that are not represented in Parliament were also invited but they stayed away. Mr. Khan was said to be abroad.

On Thursday, it was the turn of the parliamentarians to ask questions of Lt. Gen Pasha, but the PML(N), which pronounced its dissatisfaction saying that it was “too general”, and covered ground that was already well known.

The special session, barred to journalists and visitors, has been adjourned until next Monday.

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