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.”
Why do you Indians and Pakistanis have to be at each other’s throats always?
And, frankly, I also find the Indian glee unbecomng, given that this did not even concern them. Very low indeed.
For the first time, I agree with something written in Hindustan Nationalist Times. Indeed India and Pakistan are not the same people, and have never been so.
Bloody Civilian, I didn
PakWatcher/Vir Sanghvi, do keep watching Pakistan, if you must. Those in Pakistan who are fighting the battle don’t expect much from those amongst us or from across the border who completely lack in imagination and are intellectually lazy. Ignorance, however, might be less of a hindrence in this fight if, at least, the intentions are honourable. The nuances and complexities of a country, any country, are beyond those who cannot tell the difference between the sins of a dictator and those of a democratically elected government. Who cannot discriminate the people’s opinion as expressed through the ballot box, or an opinion poll, from the whim of a dictator. Those who cannot tell the difference between the state and the nation, and do not have the intellectual discipline to be able to objectively analyse either. They take the same superficial view of history – of lands, nations and religions. Imran Khan went to Oxford. Pol Pot went to La Sorbonne. A R Rehman went to Trinity College of Music. Had he known a fraction of what Sanghvi and Private Eye know about ‘Sharia Law’, he would never have made the ‘grave mistake’ he made at age 21. Why doesn’t Sanghvi put that question to A R Rehman? As a first step towards objectivity. That is if he has come up with an answer to Gorki’s question about his misuse/abuse of Gulzar first. Sanghvi was obviously busy in his deep analysis of Pakistan and the Pakistani society and that is why he completely missed the Lawyers’ and civil society’s continuing struggle and its success in removing the military dictator. You, I guess, were too busy watching Pakistan to realise that Justice Bhagwandas was the Chief Justice of Pakistan on ly recently. Chief Justice Durab Patel when Zia toppled the Govt. Despite all the problems that we face in Pakistan, of dictatorship and their unholly alliance with the obscurantist. Our hindu minority is 150 times smaller than your muslim minority. I guess to the intellectually lazy, riots, as opposed to terrorism, are mere Acts of God… even if they kill many times more than terrorist bombs and do so far less indiscrimnately. Dictators, religious obscurantists and political opportunists of all types (including extremists, dictators and wannabe despots of all ilk) thrive on those lacking in objectivity and intellectual rigour like Sanghvi to pervert history, pollute culture and undermine rule of law. It allows the state to ignore an illegal temple built in Ayodhya, and carrying on in defiance of the law of the land. It allows the discriminatory (as per the UN) religious conversion laws you have in several states. It makes it easier to carry on from 2002 with little more than a shrug of the shoulders and encourages Modi to aspire for PM-ship. It is this kind of ill-intended intellectual laziness that allows hate mongers to make war.
@ Pak Watcher and India Watcher;
Any time now I expect Prof. Najam to walk in and break up the food fight between you two ;-)..
Seriously for Pak Watcher, I have the following question and comments;
1. What is your point? This post is about a tragedy that took place in Lahore, and you post a long winded article from an Indian paper. Relevance?
2. The article you posted compares examples of secular Indians juxtaposed against examples of hypothetical ‘what ifs’ in a Pakistani setting. If being secular makes people kin to one another, then I guess using the examples quoted by Vir Sanghvi, Indians of today are long lost twins of the secular Swedes.
3. Conversely using another example, say a negative one; that of the former Akali head of the SGPC of Indian Punjab (who is accused of honor killing of her sixteen year old daughter for having an affair with a boy next door) makes the Indians now the kin of the Taliban.
I hope you see the absurdity of your (or shall we say Vir Sanghvi’s) arguments; that of kinship based strictly on the social/political climate in the nation state that one lived in. If that were the case, North and South Koreans are as different from each otherr as the Japanese are from the Zulu!
4. Finally no one on ATP mentioned ‘We are the same people Yaar’.
It is blamed by you (Vir Sanghvi) on ‘woolly headed Punjabi liberals’. I guess from his actions, Gulzar, appears to be a card carrying member of that silly liberal group.
So you use the example of the humaneness of Gulzar to trash exactly who?
Ah yes, those same ‘woolly headed liberals like him.’
I rest my case.
Next time, if you can not be original in your thoughts, try to lift up ideas from someone less self contradictory than Sanghvi.