KARACHI – Thousands of people on Saturday attended the funeral of 26 victims of FridayÂ’s twin bombings here amid tight security, as the death toll soared to 33 while police registered cases against unknown terrorists in two police stations.
Thousands of mourners, beating their chests and chanting anti-Taliban slogans, attended the funeral prayers of 14 victims in the morning at RCD Ground in Malir.
The roads wore a deserted look as the City was shut to mourn the dead and denounce the deadly bombings.
The mourners including women and children, carrying black flags, beat their chests and chanted “Labbaik Ya Hussein and Yazidiyat Murdabad”. Thirteen victims were laid to rest in Old Model Colony graveyard while the fourteenth victim, Asif Zadi, was buried in the Wadi-e-Hussain graveyard at the Superhighway. Heavy contingents of police and Rangers guarded the entire area from RCD Ground to Model Colony graveyard while main security of the procession appeared to be in the hands of activists of local Shia organizations, who thoroughly searched the participants before their entry into the RCD Ground while no vehicle was allowed to be parked near ground.
The funeral prayers of seven Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) workers was offered at Jinnah Ground, near the Muttahida headquarter Nine Zero, Azizabad, Federal B. Area. They were killed in the second blast which had occurred in the parking area of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC).
The blast dead were laid to rest in different graveyards of the City where law enforcing agencies had further beefed up security to avert any untoward incident.
The funeral of six Christians of the same family, who also lost their lives in the blast at the JPMC, was held at the Saint Patrick Cathedral Church, situated at Shahrah-e-Iraq, formerly known as Clarke Street.
Scores of people and leaders of various political parties and non-political organisations, including provincial Minister Rauf Siddiqui, MPA Stephen Asif and others attended the funeral of the dead.
Police, meanwhile, registered cases against unknown terrorists. The FIR of the first blast, which took place at Nursery Flyover, was registered in Ferozabad Police Station while the FIR of the second blast, which took place at the JPMC, was registered in Sadder Police Station.
It is worth mentioning here that Interior Minister Rehman Malik has constituted a team, including officials from ISI, IB and FIA, to probe the deadly blasts.
Meanwhile, the death toll in the twin bombings rose to 33 with at least 170 others were being treated at various hospitals, a minister said.
Law enforcement agencies are unable to track down the modus operandi used by terrorists and also do not have sufficient skills to detect and round up the members of terrorist outfits due to lack of equipment.
According to reports, police claimed to have solved the case of Ashura blast and arrested four Jundullah operatives, who planted bombs on 8th, 9th and 10th of Muharram.
Reliable sources disclosed that police officials are still unable to prove the modus operandi before the courts what an Egyptian Commander of Al-Qaeda, Hamza Joffi alias Misry, gave to the arrested operatives of Jundullah.
Police have reportedly suspected the involvement of the same terrorist outfit in FridayÂ’s blasts because the similar method was used in these cowardly acts.
Investigators revealed that Jundullah had been active in the City for the last two years and had been indulging in terrorist activities as well as financing terrorism, but the intelligence agencies did not take measures to check this seriously.
Source revealed that before the Ashura blast, the Jundullah group had carried out several explosions in the last two years at Shah Latif town, at a police mobile at Karachi Airport, at Shahrah-e-Faisal, at Superhighway to hit Rangers officer and various other attempts.
Sources disclosed that Joffi, the founder of Jundullah, trained his members in such a way that they could explode bombs from everywhere through remote control.
Source added that scores of highly trained operatives of the said group are present in the City but their arrest is a big task for the law enforcement agencies because of their highly organised network.
They further explained that all the members of the group are locals of Karachi who were previously attached with different terrorist outfits and went to Wana, Waziristan where Joffi recruited them.
Those arrested members do not even know actual identities of their accomplices till the day of their arrest, as they were being operated by Joffi from Wana who assigned each of them selected different cadres.
During the course of investigations, the culprits revealed that the group had recently looted two banks including a dacoity at Maripur area in which three including two cops were killed.
The experts of the Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS) claimed that human bombs have been exploded, but on the other hand some senior police officials, considerably an terrorism expert, said preliminary evidences and investigations indicate that the blasts were not suicidal but remote-controlled and planted in motorcycles.
Another police expert, who has vast experience of arresting and dealing with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) activists, believed that LJ operatives had the capability to carry out such sort of terrorist attacks, citing the bomb planted in a push-cart in an attempt to kill Allama Hassan Turabi.
CID (Operations) SSP Fayyaz Khan said it seemed that these explosions did not have connections with the Ashura because these were remote-controlled devices connected with the mobile phones and fixed in the TV boxes that were kept on the motorcycles.
“Such kind of modus operandi was earlier used by LJ in the murderous attempt on a Shia scholar, Allama Hassan Turabi, but he survived that attack,” SSP Khan said.
CID (Investigations) SP Mazhar Mashwani said that the engine and chassis numbers of motorcycles used in the explosions had been taken for chemical examination.
Declaring FridayÂ’s bomb attacks as suicide hits, Bomb Disposal Squad official Munir Sheikh said that a body, found from the first blast site, could be of the suicide bomber.
He further said that high-intensity explosives weighing around 15 to 20 kilograms were used in the first blast, and around 10kg explosive material was used in the second blast.
Agencies add: “More than 10,000 people attended the funeral of the 14 deceased,” said Javed Mehr, a local police official on duty at the ground.
Mehr told AFP that “the entire area was sealed off by police and paramilitary rangers to avoid any untoward incident.”
Provincial home affairs minister Zulfiqar Mirza told reporters in Karachi Saturday that the religious procession “was the main target of terrorists but they could not make it because of very strict security measures.”
“We are at war with these terrorists who are against our country, who are against our religion,” said Mirza.
He said some arrests had been made but declined to give further details.
Senior police investigator Raja Umer Khattab said the Jundullah group was behind the attacks.
“This is the same group that carried out the Ashura attack,” he said.
Khattab said some arrests had been made after the December attack but police were hunting for more members.
“We have arrested four members of this group but there are still 12 to 14 militants of this group left, who are planning these attacks,” he said.
KarachiÂ’s roads were mostly deserted Saturday while shops, business centres and educational institutions were closed as the port city mourned those killed in the two bombings.
Police and paramilitary Rangers patrolled streets and sensitive areas and Mehr said security had been stepped up at all hospitals.