Police deployment insufficient at time of Sehwan attack, admits Sindh CM

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah on Monday briefed the Sindh Assembly regarding the attack at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan last month that had claimed nearly 100 lives and left hundreds other injured.

The chief minister informed the house that the deployment of police at the shrine on the night of attack was insufficient and claimed that a “VVIP” had taken the police personnel deployed in the area along with him about half an hour before the attack took place.

“I don’t want to spell out… who had taken police [personnel] with him about half an hour earlier [before the bombing],” Murad said before the house.

Refusing to take names, the chief minister only specified that the person he was referring to was not a politician, as he added “I don’t want to blame anybody”.

Murad said they did not had any “specific” security threat for Sehwan and conceded that the provincial authorities should have been extra vigilant after the blast at the Shah Noorani shrine in Balochistan’s Khuzdar district last year that claimed 52 lives.

He said the functionality of CCTV cameras at the shrine was hampered by loadshedding “which I am not responsible for”.

Because the cameras were being run on generators, he said, their resolution was affected. “Due to low voltage from the generators, the CCTV footage had turned black and white from colour.”

“Despite that, we have identified the suicide bomber after examining the footage from the same cameras,” he maintained.

Limited resources

“Five hundred people were affected due to the blast but let’s admit it that 500 ambulances cannot be made available in Sehwan, considering the limited resources we have,” the Sindh chief minister said.

In sehwan there is only a 50-bed hospital and a 20-bed trauma centre which is still being developed, Shah added.

“I can’t have a thousand-bed hospital in Sehwan. We do not have the resources, but whatever resources were available they were mobilised,” he told the house.

There were eight ambulances available in Sehwan and they all reached the blast site within 15 minutes of the attack.

Giving a breakdown of the casualties from the attack, he said a total of 383 people were injured in the bombing, 10 of whom are still hospitalised.

Among the 81 people killed in the attack 46 were men, 10 women and 25 children under the age of 15, he said. “Of the dead, only three people remain unidentified.”

He said Karachi was “definitely” on the radar of terrorists, adding that a meeting was scheduled to reassess the security arrangements of shrines in the province.

“Sehwan is a very small town, If this incident had occurred in Karachi, a crisis situation would have emerged in the hospitals here as well.”

Source: Dawn