KARACHI: Muhammad Akram Baloch sits idle staring into space with stony eyes during his visit to the local office of the Pakistan Peoples Party in Lyari, the party’s stronghold in the city.

After a formal exchange of pleasantries, he carefully opens up until his eyes start sparkling and his tone becomes heavier as he remembers the days of his glory in the party’s structural folds.

The 52-year-old diehard worker of the party is an eyewitness to one of the most tragic moments: the first attempt on the life of party’s chairperson Benazir Bhutto. It was Oct 18, 2007, Sharea Faisal was packed with thousands of party workers, who drove from across the country to participate in Ms Bhutto’s homecoming rally.

The PPP chairperson had returned to the country ending her eight-year-long self-imposed exile.

Victim families unable to understand what holds back PPP from launching probe, delivering justice

“I cannot forget that day because it was a historic day. With a sea of jubilant workers pouring into the city from every corner of the country,” says Mr Baloch, trying to explain the enthusiasm and momentum on the day.

He was the in-charge of the Janisara-i-Benazir Bhutto — a private security force comprising party workers who volunteered to protect Ms Bhutto.

Read: My father survived the Karsaz bombing; each new terror attack takes us back there

“I was commanding a force of 5,000 young volunteers on Oct 18, who were assigned the duty to escort the especially designed ‘bomb-proof’ truck in which BB [Ms Bhutto] was leading the convoy of her homecoming rally from Karachi airport”, he proudly tells Dawn.

“There was the first layer of the volunteers making human shields with the help of a rope at a distance of 50 feet from the BB’s truck. Then, there was the second layer at a distance of 100-feet”, he explains. “We had received BB at around 11am from the airport, but the convoy reached Karsaz at around midnight,” he says.

200 people killed

Karsaz is the place where two suicide bombers blew themselves up in order to target Ms Bhutto. Around 200 people were killed and more than 500 others wounded when two blasts in quick succession ripped through the procession on Oct 18, 2007.

“We drove BB to the Bilawal House in just 12 minutes and then I returned to the blast site to find scores of my security volunteers and others dead,” he adds. “Among them were 100 volunteers of the Janisaran-i-Benazir Bhutto, including two of my maternal nephews, Basit Sarbazi and Liaquat Ali,” he says.

Basit, a 20-year-old student, was visiting his family living in Lyari when he decided to join the voluntary force out of his own wish.

Liaquat, in his mid-50s, was a driver and father of six children in Lyari’s Bheempura neighbourhood, who had insisted on taking him in the volunteers’ group. “The very next day, BB visited the families of the victims and assured them of justice,” says Mr Baloch. “But, hundreds of families were still awaiting such justice,” he lamented. “Asif Ali Zardari sahib used to say that democracy is the best revenge,” says Akram Baloch. “Now, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari is also repeating the same. But, we hope that the young Bhutto will get us justice too, which has not been done in the last 15 years despite the PPP rule,” the veteran supporter of the party says.

And it is not Akram Baloch alone. Hundreds of families of those who died on the day also ask the same question from their party every time the anniversary of victims of Karsaz blasts is observed.

Inquiries and trial

Three inquiry committees had been constituted since 2008 to trace the mastermind, handlers and executors of the attack, but to no avail.

After the devastating blasts, the then provincial government, led by chief minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim, had set up an inquiry tribunal to investigate the twin blasts. The tribunal headed by retired Justice Dr Ghous Mohammad started proceedings and recorded statements of around 40 witnesses.

Read: 10 years on, no headway in Karsaz blasts investigation

However, Ms Bhutto was assassinated in a gun-and-bomb attack in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. Her party, however, formed governments at the Centre and in Sindh after the 2008 general elections.

And on April 6, 2008 Dr Zulfikar Mirza, who was the chief security adviser to Ms Bhutto, had told reporters that the Sindh government would set up a new tribunal to probe the Karsaz blasts since the party had no trust in the proceedings of the tribunal formed by the previous government.

However, despite being in power in the province since 2008, the PPP government has not set up a tribunal to inquire into the tragedy.

Besides Sindh, the PPP also enjoyed power at the Centre until 2013, but nobody has so far been arrested or produced in court in the Karsaz bombing case.

Legal experts say the proceedings of the Karsaz tribunal had highlighted several flaws in the security arrangements for Ms Bhutto’s homecoming procession.

The flaws were on the part of both the law enforcement agencies and the organisers, and the PPP apparently disbanded the tribunal and did not establish another one as it “did not want to accept the responsibility of any security lapse on its part”, they add.

On the fourth anniversary of the Karsaz bombing, Dr Mirza had made a startling disclosure claiming that he was stopped from proceeding with the inquiry after then president Asif Ali Zardari was given a briefing.

Dr Mirza said that he was asked not to proceed with the probe when president Zardari had been briefed that this inquiry could adversely affect the investigation of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

In 2012, then Sindh chief minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah said that the provincial government had constituted another committee headed by a DIG to inquire into the Karsaz tragedy. But there was no outcome to those inquiries either.

Key witnesses killed

Two key witnesses in the case — Khalid Shahenshah and Bilal Shaikh — both senior security officers at Bilawal House, who had accompanied Ms Bhutto at Karsaz, have been killed in separate incidents of alleged targeted killing.

Shahenshah, 45, a personal guard of Ms Bhutto and said to be a key witness to her assassination, was killed by unknown assailants riding a motorcycle outside his Clifton residence on July 22, 2008.

Later, Bilal Shaikh, who accompanied Benazir Bhutto at Karsaz to Bilawal House, was killed in a suicide attack in Karachi’s Jamshed Quarters in July 2013.

An antiterrorism court acquitted Shahid Bikik, an alleged gangster operating in Lyari with other suspects, in Shaikh’s murder case.

On Oct 18, 2017, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah had also announced that a five-member inquiry committee headed by Counter-Terrorism Department chief Sanaullah Abbasi was set up to reinvestigate the twin blasts case. But till date, no positive development took place.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2022