Adil Najam
In this still-developing story, unknown gunmen opened fire on the Sri Lankan cricket team bus near Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore leaving several security officials dead and several Sri Lankan cricketers were rushed to the hospital.
The News is reporting at least 5 security officials dead while The Times reports that as many as 8 Sri Lankan crickets might have been injured. However, latest reports point out that the injuries to the players are minor, although the shock is deep.
According to an earlier report from the Associated Press:
LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — A dozen masked gunmen armed with rifles and rocket launchers attacked a vehicle carrying members of Sri Lanka’s national cricket team Tuesday, wounding at least two players and killing five police officers, officials said.
The attack in Lahore came at a time of unrest in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, both of whom are trying to defeat insurgencies. It was unclear who was behind the assault, but it appeared to have been carefully coordinated. City police chief Haji Habibur Rehman said five policemen died in the shooting and that two players were wounded. A Pakistan Cricket Board security official had earlier said eight players were wounded.
“It was a terrorist attack and the terrorists used rocket launchers, hand grenades and other weapons,” Rehman said, adding that the police were hunting down the attackers who managed to flee. “Our police sacrificed their lives to protect the Sri Lankan team.”
He said one wounded player was hit in the leg while the other received a bullet in the chest.
Sri Lankan team manager Brendon Kruppu said the team’s batsman, Kumar Sangakkara, was among those injured near Gaddafi Stadium ahead of a game. Rehman said 12 masked gunmen participated in the attack. Footage from the scene Tuesday showed the team’s white van with its front window shattered as security officials tried to gain control of the scene in an intersection.
Security concerns have plagued Pakistan for years and some foreign sports teams have refused to play here.Most of the violence in Pakistan occurs in its northwest regions bordering Afghanistan, where Taliban and al-Qaida militants have established strongholds. Lahore has not been immune from militant violence however, and at least one attack in recent months in the northwest has occurred next to a sports stadium. Sri Lanka appeared on the brink of crushing the Tamil Tiger rebels after more than a quarter century of civil war.
In recent months, government forces have pushed the guerrillas out of much of the de facto state they controlled in the north of the Indian Ocean island nation and trapped them in a small patch of land along the coast. The rebels, who are fighting for an independent state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, are listed as a terror group by the U.S. and EU and are routinely blamed for suicide bombings and other attacks targeting civilians.
The rebels rarely launch attacks outside Sri Lanka, though their most prominent attack — the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female suicide bomber — took place at an election rally in India in 1991.
As reader Eidee Man wrote in his comment elsewhere on thsi blog (in alerting us to this news): “Everything is officially going to hell.”
“Yet all I see is a gleeful smuggness is as disappointing as it is cheap and tacky
@ D_A_N, Amir Ali,
Reading your comments, one can not help but empathize with your pain.
I agree with you that today is not the day anyone should be making comparisons; rubbing in as to how civilized they are. Similarly not only today but anyone who ever gloats at another’s pain is simply disgusting and does not deserve a comment.
As you pointed out, the only civilized ones are those who like Bonobashi find the time to encourage and identify with the victims and other Pakistanis of all hues.
Such people are the only ones who make India proud.
In fact today is not even a day to decide who is Indian and who is Pakistani.
Today, we are all Pakistanis, and today we are all proud to salute the courage of those selfless policemen who laid down their lives defending the Sri Lankans in Lahore.
@PakWatcher
If acts of terrorism in USA, Spain, Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, 9/11, etc. are examined, they will show no link to Pakistan or the ISI.
Indians can gloat as much as they wish over this event, but the fact is much of the terrorism in India is home-grown and screaming at Pakistan is not going to solve all of your problems either.
This is sheer negligence of Govt of Punjab while there were reports from CID that Raw is planning to attack on Srilankan team in Lahore! What we can say when the all concentration is going on Horse Trading in Punjab!
This is a horrible act of terrorism. Thankfully, the players are safe, but the security personnel were not so lucky. This incident reminds me of the terror attack on the Indian Parliament in Dec 2001. In both incidents, the bravery of the security personnel, mostly low-level and underpaid policemen, was on display.
It is hard to prevent such brazen attacks altogether, but I am sure it would be in Pakistan’s interests to review its entire security apparatus and ensure that the procedures, equipment and training are in place to make it extremely hard for anybody to carry out such an attack. It is one thing for such attacks to succeed against soft targets, like in Mumbai in Nov. 2008. It is quite another to successfully carry out an attack when there is such high level of security. It is also important to find the internal elements that helped in this attack – the route taken by the team was changed and yet the attack happened, indicating some compromising of the security services themselves.
While this is no consolation to the families of those who were killed or injured, their bravery prevented this from being a much worse situation than it is. It would be hard to imagine what would have happened had one or more of the players been killed in the attack. My condolences and sympathies with these families who have been hit hard.