We’ve all seen the headlines: ‘two injured in cracker blast’, ‘gun-cum-cracker attack on media house office.’ This misleading term is used so often that one may start imagining there’s some rogue fireworks maker on a rampage across Karachi.

While that may or may not be the case, the fact is that what media and law-enforcement agencies so lazily call a ‘cracker’ is anything but the harmless fireworks that we otherwise picture them to be.

It’s a term stuck in the minds of our law-enforcement agencies who apply it frivolously to a number of explosive incidents.

It is in fact something of an improvised ‘desi’ hand grenade, a cross, perhaps a hand grenade and a large fire cracker.

For the most part, it is a sphere packed with aluminum powder, explained an official of the bomb disposal squad.

“The aluminum powder is what makes the loud sound and this is how the cracker got its name,” he says. “It’s also quite volatile and explodes when friction occurs.”

A cracker is an IED, but every IED is not a cracker.

Typical crackers, like the ones chucked at shops or other commercial places by unidentified motorcyclists, are made with tennis balls.

“What these people do is cut open a tennis ball, stuff it with aluminum powder and wrap it in tape. The rubber vessel makes for the container and provides friction so when the cracker is thrown somewhere it immediately explodes due to impact,” says a bomb disposal squad official on condition of anonymity.

Though an average cracker bomb packs about 300 grams of explosives, it’s not as dangerous as a grenade, even though the latter contains only 65 grams of explosive material.

“This is because a grenade is an ‘ordnance explosive device’ meaning it is made in factories,” he explained. “While IEDs are made by amateurs, even though these may contain more explosive material, they still might not have the same kind of destructive impact.”

There’s also no real standardisation at work here. The composition of cracker bombs varies according to the purpose it is meant for. When the purpose is to cause serious damage, they fill it with shrapnel or ball-bearings which is quite dangerous even for those standing at a distance as these metal bits fly through the air, injuring all in the blast radius.

Generally speaking, if a hand-hurled IED contains aluminum powder then it would fall under the broad definition of a ‘cracker’.

For example, the recent series of ‘cracker’ blasts on railway tracks across Sindh were in fact a series of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which were attached to the tracks. “I saw them once, they were pipe bombs,” said the official. “The makers stuff explosives inside a piece of PVC pipe, seal the ends and then attach a fuse. Usually around a kilo of explosive material is used in them and that’s enough to damage the railway tracks.” It may be dangerous but it was not, as reported, a ‘cracker’.

But it’s not just confusion or lazy definition that’s to blame here.

A former CID official conceded that the police or other law-enforcement agencies were in a habit of declaring explosions to have been caused by crackers when they wanted to downplay the extent of damage in a certain incident.

“Oftentimes when hand grenades are recovered in large amounts they are declared as crackers,” he said. “Since a lot of people believe that crackers aren’t that dangerous, it tends to give the police a little leeway.”

Another reason for this is when the media badger policemen to reveal to them the cause of an explosion before even an initial examination has been done in the area, it is easier to make crackers the scapegoat. “Since our policemen aren’t that well-trained, they cannot differentiate immediately between a grenade blast and an explosion caused by a cracker.”