An Untold Story

A Scence at the place of incident

On 11th June 2004 the Karachi Corps Commander Lieutenant-General Ahsan Saleem Hayat narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while seven army men and three police officers were killed in the incident. After this incident investigations were started immediately. The investigation committee ultimately reached the hands behinds this assassination attempt.

 

Before I begin I would like to talk my heart out about the mobile communications infrastructure in Pakistan. The bombs planted at the scene were supposed to be activated remotely by placing a call to the mobile phone attached with the bombs as ignition. One of the bombs was blasted that way, the other one couldnt be blasted. Why? Because the mobile phone service providers network was busy due to high contention and a call couldnt be placed.

 

Apart from this seriously funny mobile network unavailability and no action by the concerned service provider on enhancing the equipment to accommodate higher contention, the investigation committee reacted to the situation pretty quickly and arrested the culprits after a long and hectic, but worthy search.

 

Then one night when I was attending the marriage ceremony of my former classmate, I kept asking all my classmates about the ones who were not present at the ceremony, and suddenly I remembered a name. The person who was so close to the Groom in the college was missing. I asked others about him -- "Why is he not present at the ceremony?" And then I heard the shocking news -- he is being arrested, and is under a physical remand with local police authorities. "The reason for his arrest?", I asked others. They took me to a corner and told me the reason. He is arrested because of an attempt of murder on the Corps Commander of Karachi, said one of my classmates.

 

The news was no less than a shocker to me. The person who took part in the college dramas, the person who was good at singing emotional love songs -- how could he ever do such a thing? Then I was told that a few months back he joined some militant organization which has links with Al-Qaeda. I couldnt believe this statement. Al-Qaeda do things in the name of religion, and our missing classmate apparently was not one of those persons who is close to religion. How could he attempt murder in the name of religion? Does he not know that Islam disallows killing a human being unless they are a threat to your life and family?

 

It then dawned on me that, for the last three months he was not happy with the current government and kept saying to them that the current government is imposed on us by the devil. He was worried about "who will stand against it? -- It has to be one of us." Though his mates were like, "shut-up" and "cut the crap", probably this wasnt enough to change his mind. After that he went to some former Russian state for training and getting the explosives and then made the attack on the Corps Commander of Karachi.

 

The original plan was to take the Corps Commander hostage and get demands met by the government. The bunch, I think, forgot what a commando badged Corps Commander would have done to them after they kidnapped him. But the unexpected convoy of the Corps Commander made them open fire over the convoy and leave in a hurry.

 

The very objective of this story is that we as a society should realize the potential of a person and react to him accordingly. What could have caused a pathetic person in discussion to leave a journalism job in a cheap newspaper and become a terrorist? Whereas, in his own mind, he was doing it all for the sake of God. The question which needs an answer here is, why it was made so difficult for a person to interpret the teachings of a religion. What steps can we take at society level to prevent such happenings in the future. Who needs to take steps, the government or we?