Car bomb outside church was meant for police, says government

A car bomb that exploded on Thursday outside a bible society’s office in the southern port city of Karachi, injuring at least 12 people and damaging the wall of a church close by, was actually an attack against law-enforcement agencies, according to a government official. “It was an attack against law agencies, not against the church or Christianity or the bible society. A police van was attacked and policemen were injured; rangers [elite paramilitary soldiers] were injured,” Salahuddin Haider, the information advisor to the Sindh provincial government, told IRIN from Karachi. The car bomb went off in a crowded street next to the damaged Trinity Church, minutes after witnesses said two men on a motorbike threw a grenade at the Pakistan Bible Society’s Christian Reading Library. Most of the injured were policemen or people in the crowd that gathered after the first, smaller explosive had been lobbed. Investigations had been ordered, with three teams formed immediately to probe whether the attacks had been carried out by locals or people from outside the province, of which Karachi is the capital, Haider said. “We apprehend this was a reaction to what is happening in South Waziristan agency,” he added, in a direct reference to ongoing operations by the Pakistani army in search of suspected Islamic militants in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) tribal area which borders Afghanistan. What was clear, though, Haider stressed, was that the Bible Society was not the target. “It was actually a couple of small devices that exploded just to create a scare in the public. When a police van came to see what happened, they were attacked with bombs,” he explained. However, others were inclined to disagree. “The Bible Society and the church were targeted. This was a targeted attack on the society and the church,” Shahbaz Bhatti, the chairman of the All Pakistan Minorities Association (APMA), told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. “This terrorist attack has increased the sense of insecurity among Christians throughout Pakistan because we already lost many lives in previous attacks,” he added. The attack was the first on a Christian target since late 2002, when five attacks through the year resulted in the deaths of over 20 people. In March that year, a church attended by diplomats was attacked by a suicide bomber followed by two attacks in August when gunmen attacked a missionary school in the hill resort of Murree, close to the capital Islamabad, killing six people, and a grenade caused the deaths of four more in a hospital chapel in Taxila, also close to Islamabad. The worst attack came a month later, in September 2002, when seven Christian welfare workers in Karachi were shot in the head, after their hands and feet had been bound, in their office. And yet another attack in December 2002 saw three more people killed in their church in a village in Punjab. “The government should not put this case in cold storage. There should be an inquiry at the highest level,” Bhatti stressed.