The blast that shook a five-star hotel in Islamabad on Thursday has generated a new sense of scare among the people, while some embarrassed government leaders have been making unsuccessful efforts at a cover-up. As it is, the hotel is situated in the vicinity of the capital's high security area where most of the foreign embassies are located, and the Federal Secretariat is only at a stone's throw from it.
Hence many members of the diplomatic community as well as politicians and government officials use it frequently to spend leisurely evenings there. In fact, a few American diplomats were present in the hotel when the blast came like a bolt from the blue, injuring several people, including one American and three Italian businessmen.
According to eyewitness accounts, the blast was so severe that it shattered virtually every window on the hotel's ground floor, and caused extensive damage to its front entrance. Such was the power of the blast that aside from the front entrance, it also blew out windows at the back of the main lobby, at least 30 meters from the spot of actual impact, and it could be heard from a distance of one kilometer.
Yet two federal ministers, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, have been insisting that a mere electric short-circuiting caused all this. People are rightly at a loss to understand as to how this could be since electric short-circuiting is known to cause fires, not massive explosions such as the present one. Only a bomb blast could do this kind of damage.
Though the State Department, whose officers, apparently, were the main target, has left it to Islamabad to investigate and determine the cause of the incident, its Islamabad embassy immediately issued an advisory, telling Americans to stay away from the vicinity of the hotel while its risk analysis unit back in Washington said a home-made bomb had caused the explosion.
However, those assigned with the duty of defending the indefensible position that Islamabad had taken on the day the incident happened, have stuck to their stance.
The Director-General of the Interior Ministry's Crisis Management Cell, Brig. Javed Cheema, told the press, "We haven't found any evidence that would suggest that it was an act of sabotage."
The Interior Minister too took the same line while the Information Minister categorically ruled out the possibility of the incident being an act of terrorism, saying that what happened was a sheer accident. Well, in a way he could be right for acts of terrorism too are unpredictable and therefore may be characterised as accidents.
Sheikh Rashid also made the interesting comment that it was undesirable to jump to any conclusion prior to the completion of investigation. That raises the pertinent question, why then is he asserting with such certainty that the explosion was the result of short-circuiting and not a bomb explosion? He too should have reserved his confident assertions on the subject until the completion of the inquiry. Also, it would be useful to know as to how he explains the fact that just one day after the incident the Prime Minister ordered the transfer of Islamabad's Inspector General of Police, Fayyaz Ahmed Turo, for "failing to maintain law and order."
Apparently, he and Sherpao have been saying what they have said with a view to give a feeling of assurance to the people. In that respect their efforts at a cover-up are understandable, but still not acceptable. For, from the details of the blast that have become available it is obvious to anyone with a little bit of common sense that it was not the result of a short-circuiting but a bomb blast.
Thus the two ministers can go on saying what they have to, but only at the risk of damaging the government's credibility and erosion of public trust in its ability to provide security at public places.
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