Relatives' agonising wait to identify Brussels dead

Forensic experts were on Thursday still going through the grisly and complex process of identifying victims of the Brussels bomb attacks, as families of those missing endured an agonising wait, their hopes fading by the hour.

As friends and relatives anxiously sought news from the increasingly desperate search, Belgian police experts were going through the painstaking work required to confirm the fatalities.

Tuesday's attacks at Brussels airport and at a metro station in the Belgian capital killed 31 people and injured another 300, 61 of whom were in critical condition.

Identification is proving slow, complicated by the violence of the explosions and because many of the victims were foreigners, police told RTBF television.

Around 40 nationalities are thought to be among the dead and wounded.

Their diverse backgrounds reflect the cosmopolitan nature of Brussels, Europe's symbolic capital.

"We have lost contact with Frank Deng. We've checked with his hotel in Brussels. He left at 7:16am, and went to the airport where his flight was at 9:05am," David Ye, a close friend, told AFP.

Jewellery, teeth and DNA

The first port of call for worried friends and relatives is the 1771 emergency number set up by the Belgian authorities.

Upon phoning they are told whether their loved ones are on a list of the injured. If not they are directed towards the Reine-Astrid military hospital, where a team of doctors, police officers and Red Cross staff has been specially put together to liaise with them.

Some 30 specialists, including the seven permanent Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team experts, are working to identify the bodies or remains of victims recovered from the attack scenes.

"They collect all the items they can: jewellery, wallets, clothes, human remains," said Belgian police spokesman Michael Jonnois.

"They will compare these post-mortem items with ante-mortem information: how tall the person was, their weight, hair, et cetera.

"In extreme cases, we can resort to DNA samples. We can identify them from their teeth, genetic code or fingerprint."

He added: "We want to have 100 percent certainty. We cannot allow ourselves to have the slightest doubt."

Desperate search

A Facebook page where worried relatives, friends and colleagues can post notices of the missing has been set up. Pictures already uploaded show men and women, young and old, from Belgium and across the globe.

They have been shared thousands of times as people try to spread the word in the hope of finding out what happened to their loved ones.

"HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Her name is ALINE BASTIN, Belgian, 29 years old. She was most probably on the metro," read one.

"We are DESPERATELY looking for her -- should you have any news, PLEASE give a sign!"

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa announced Thursday that Jimmy Montenegro, 37, from the northern city of Ibarra, was in a "very serious" condition after being caught in the metro blast.

"The wound is in the brain and the situation is critical," Montenegro's brother Marcelo Trujillo told AFP. The victim's wife said a piece of metal had hit the right side of his brain.

New York siblings Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski were at the airport. A Dutch newspaper said they were on the telephone to a relative when the bombs went off and the line went dead.

There has been no news of them since.

David Dixon, 51, a British computer programmer who lived in Brussels, texted his aunt after the airport blasts to say he was safe, but there are fears he was caught up in the metro attack.

"We are anxiously waiting for more information about our dear David," his family said in a statement.

"We continue to hope for good news."

Three confirmed fatalities

So far, just three of the fatalities have been named.

Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz, a 37-year-old Peruvian woman who lived in Belgium, was killed in the airport blasts, the foreign ministry in Lima confirmed.

Another victim was Belgian civil servant Olivier Delespesse, according to his employer.

He was killed in the metro attack, local media reported, along with 20-year-old Belgian law student Leopold Hecht, who was named by his university.

Hecht's family has decided to donate his organs.

"We know it's the decision he would have wanted us to take," they told La Libre Belgique newspaper.

"We hope that giving his organs will save a life or help someone else."

With explosions like the ones we witnessed on Monday, the situation is very different than an airplane crash, where you more or less know the number of victims and their identities. The goal in that situation is to find and confirm the identities of the remains.

With explosions, there are many pieces of the puzzle that have to be pieced together, including the number of people in the vicinity of the explosions, their current whereabouts and whether they potentially match the deceased.

As things stand now, families are being told it could take up to three weeks before we hear more conclusive information about identification. To complicate matters further, while the cause of death will likely be attributed to the explosions, investigators still need to provide a more precise manner of death, such as blunt organ injury, shrapnel or smoke inhalation.

Three waves of injury in a bombing

Part of the difficulty is that when a bomb explodes, there are three waves of injury.

First, there is a primary blast -- a concussive wave, really -- that compresses everything around it. The most common fatal injury is called a blast lung, because the lungs, which are essentially large air sacs, are so rapidly compressed by this primary blast that the result is sudden death.

Second comes the debris -- shrapnel and bomb fragments -- causing devastating penetrating injuries.

Third are the bodies themselves, which are catapulted through the air and into or on top of other victims.

Identification is proving especially difficult because many of the bodies are not intact, Red Cross Belgium spokeswoman An Luyten told CNN. Those individual parts need to be identified and then "reassociated" with the rest of the body, according to Victor Weedn, chairman of the Department of Forensic Sciences at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Authorities may not release the bodies to the families until all of the remains have been positively identified, he said.

The types of injuries on the Brussels bombings are rarely seen outside of combat. Belgian Health Minister Maggie De Block has described the scene as a war zone.

Hospitals facing war injuries after Brussels attacks

"All our patients are now in 25 different hospitals because they have such severe injuries and surgeons tell me that they are like war injuries," De Block told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday, listing serious burns and amputations among the injuries.

Back in October 2005, Brussels Airport opened a "full-service" morgue to facilitate transportation of the deceased. At the time, it was only the second of its kind in Europe. Now, it's serving on a scale no one anticipated. A disaster victim identification team, which is a division of the police, has been brought in and are working to identify the bodies at the airport, the Red Cross' Luyten told CNN.

'What color were their eyes?'

The Red Cross provides psychological support during the process while police ask basic questions to the family such as, "What was your loved one wearing?" and "What color were their eyes?" Luyten told CNN. Authorities also ask for dental records as part of the process of identifying the deceased after large explosions.

"It's a terrible scene to work, but ... mass disasters happen -- plane crashes, terrorist activities -- and we have highly specialized, trained individuals," CNN contributor Larry Kobilinsky told CNN's Ashleigh Banfield on "Legal View" on Thursday.

"They're part of mortuary teams, and they are primarily pathologists, with other kinds of scientists, DNA experts, odontologists (dentists). And the idea is to collect every part.

"You've got to document everything, sketch it, photograph it, but certainly collect every single body part. If the body is more or less intact, you could try to identify by height, weight, gender, hair color, eye color, dental records, fingerprints."

"On top of this, you need to create a DNA database of close relatives or samples that we know come from these individuals," said Kobilinsky, a forensic scientist and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Ultimately, next of kin is going to want to bury their loved ones. So we need to get everything together, kind of like a puzzle, putting the pieces together, so that ... these people can be laid to rest."

And sometimes the puzzle remains incomplete. Eight years after the Oklahoma city bombing, a woman was discovered to have been buried with another victim's leg.

Just 60% of those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were ever officially identified. More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina hit, the city of New Orleans still has 31 unidentified remains.

While we don't yet know the identities of the deceased, we do know they are composed of at least 40 nationalities. The responsibility to notify next of kin typically falls to the ministries of foreign affairs or victims' respective country's embassy.

The painstaking process of identifying the victims will continue for weeks and months, with little rest for investigators.

None of it, of course, will bring back the dead or provide more solace for the living. The goal for these experts is to provide some measure of closure to the victims' families.

Friday 25 March 2016

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/24/health/belgium-brussels-bombing-victim-identification/index.html

continue reading

Spaniards remember the 191 people killed and 2,000 injured in the terrorist attacks

Spaniards dressed in black and gathered in the Almudena Cathedral on Tuesday to mourn and mark the 10-year anniversary of the deadly 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid, when bombs ripped through four commuter trains and killed 191 people.

“The anniversaries affect you a great deal,” Antonio Gomez, who was on a train and broke his leg when a bomb detonated, told AFP. “It is a strange feeling, of pain, of sadness, of rage. It’s a mixture of many feelings at the same time. Rage because we were just workers riding a train. We were not important personalities, people with a lot of money, we were regular people. What do regular people have to do with politics? We were going to work to earn money to raise our families and live decently.”

King Juan Carlos and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy joined in the commemoration.

While many use the anniversary as a day of remembrance, Gomez was avoiding reminders of the “Dantesque” wreckage and mutilation: “On the 11th I will probably go to the cinema or watch the children’s station Disney Channel,” he said.

Tuesday 11 March 2014

http://time.com/19795/spain-mourn-victims-of-madrid-train-bombings-10-years-later/

continue reading

After 30 years Beirut Barracks bombing not forgotten

All was quiet on that fateful morning of October 23, 1983 in Beirut Lebanon.

That silence shattered at 6:22 AM, when a lone terrorist driving a Mercedes Benz water truck loaded with the military explosive PETN (the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT), accelerated through the public parking lot south of the building and crashed through a barbed wire and concertina fence.

The truck passed through two guard posts without being engaged by fire, went around one sewer pipe obstacle, smashed through the Sergeant of the Guard’s booth, breached the building, and detonated.

It is believed to be the largest man-made, non-nuclear explosion in history. As the smoke and debris cleared, all that remained of the four story Marine Battalion Landing Team Headquarters was a thirty nine foot crater and the lifeless bodies of 241 brave American servicemen.

A Defense Department report concluded that the concentration of a large number of U.S. military personnel combined with its location near a busy airport made the Battalion Headquarters Building a prime target for terrorists.

Since this was a peacekeeping mission, guards on interior posts were under orders that they could not have loaded weapons. The sentry at one of those interior posts immediately identified the truck as a threat, but by the time he inserted his magazine clip into his M-16 rifle and chambered a round, the truck had already entered the building.

A few minutes after that bomb went off, a second bomber drove into the basement of the nearby French paratroopers’ barracks, killing 58 more people. Four months after the bombing, American forces left Lebanon without retaliating.

'Something was up'

As the sun rose on that bright October morning, retired Staff Sgt. Melvin Hunnicutt had just taken off his boots and fallen asleep after a night of security duty. Then a sergeant with 10th Marines, he and about 120 other Marines had been guarding the northern perimeter of the base. They had seen a lot of activity, inside and outside the wire, the night before, he said. They had received sporadic gunfire, and were also skeptical of the actions of some Lebanese troops who were supposed to be guarding a nearby section of the perimeter.

“We knew something was up, we just didn’t know what,” he said.

At 6:22 a.m., about an hour after Hunnicutt fell asleep, a yellow truck packed with explosives barreled past the base guards and towards the barracks that housed hundreds of sleeping Marines assigned to Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. Less than half a mile away, Hunnicutt was jolted awake by the blast and sprinted outside. He couldn’t see the barracks through the thick, gray smoke.

“The first thing I saw was a great big cloud, full of debris,” he said. “Pieces of paper and whatnot were falling out of the cloud, and something flew past my head. It was the corner of a letter and it just said, ‘Dear son.’ I just let the wind carry it away.”

Retired Navy Senior Chief Darrell Gibson was about a mile from the barracks, housed with some Marines in the basement of an old library. Then a hospital corpsman second class, he was transferred out of the barracks just weeks before.

As they slept on their cots, the massive blast hurled some of the troops into the air. They scrambled to the door, disoriented, to see what had happened.

“Everybody said, ‘It looks like the BLT,’ ” he said. “Then it startled everybody for a few seconds because ... the dust starts settling back down ... and the BLT doesn’t exist.”

Hard lessons

The shock of that day reverberates through the years. Marines were forced to reassess their standards and preparations for deployments in dangerous hotspots around the world. Americans had to come to grips with a new kind of enemy, an enemy it remains engaged with on a daily basis.

“We were too lax,” Gibson said. “We weren’t prepared.”

Marines have learned not to mix alcohol with deployments, he said. The night before the attack, there was a USO show that some of the Marines and other troops attended. Each person was allowed two beers, and some Marines drank more if their buddies handed them their drinks, he said.

Gibson remained in the Navy for 23 more years following the bombing. Having served in the Corps for four years himself, he wanted to be a corpsman so he could continue working with Marines.

When he deployed to Iraq shortly before leaving the service, Gibson said he was pleased by the level of professionalism he saw. The Marines were always on their game and well-equipped, he said.

Hunnicutt said calling the Beirut deployment a “peacekeeping” mission left them confined by rules of engagement that didn’t match what was happening on the ground. They weren’t handing candy out to kids, he said. It was a war zone. They went there as peacetime Marines, but had war thrust upon them, he said.

“We’re the only ones that call it a war,” Hunnicutt said. “When you’ve got artillery coming out on top of your head, you get small-arms fire daily, you get mortared, you get [rocket-propelled grenades] flying over your area and you get the biggest truck bomb in the world driving through your double doors — yeah, we thought of it as a war.”

Complaints about ROEs downrange remain common today. Military commanders must constantly weigh the risks to service members in harm’s way against the need for restraint when winning hearts and minds is a key component of mission success.

As a corpsman, Gibson’s experience treating some difficult wounds in the hours and days following the attack in Beirut led to him being made an instructor for other corpsmen upon his return. He knew how to deal with combat injuries, like shrapnel or amputations, during peacetime, and those were valuable skills to pass on.

But military first-responders were forced to re-examine their procedures on peacekeeping missions, he said. The corpsmen were not well-equipped to deal with death or serious injuries on that deployment, he said. They had to wrap bodies in poncho liners or place them in boxes until they could transport them, he said.

For most of his career, Gibson said he wouldn’t talk about what happened in Beirut. He deployed several more times, including to Iraq in 2006, but it was only after his family pressured him to get help that he began to open up about his experiences there, he said. He hopes that lesson is not lost on today’s young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. War veterans simply must conquer their fear of being stigmatized or pulled off of deployments if they are dealing with difficult experiences, he said.

Shared heritage

On a recent rainy evening, retired Gunnery Sgt. David Stanley led a group of first graders up to the Beirut Memorial, just outside Lejeune’s gate. Stanley serves as the community chairman for a Cub Scout pack, so he teaches kids about their community. And in a place like Jacksonville, local and Marine Corps heritage are deeply intertwined.

Beirut “took a lot from the Jacksonville community because a lot of those people lived here,” he said. “It was a big hit for the community.”

Stanley, like Hunnicutt, was an artilleryman with 10th Marines, when he was in the Corps. It’s important that what happened in Beirut be kept in everyone’s memory because it serves as an example of the sacrifices Marines make every day, he said.

It’s important to recount what happened, especially for new generations of Americans, because they are too young too remember it, he said.

Master Sgt. Don Ream, a ground ordnance maintenance chief with 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion at Lejeune, said the attack in Beirut was a difficult learning experience at the outset of a war on terrorism that continues today, and it should never be forgotten.

As his son, one of the Tiger Cub Scouts, took in the memorial that night, Ream said seeing members of the Jacksonville community still honoring the troops who died three decades ago means a lot to service members. The 30th Beirut Observance Ceremony will be held at the Beirut Memorial at 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 23.

“It shows me as a service member that civilians out there, our community members, still understand the sacrifices that we make, and they keep thinking about us long after we’re gone,” he said.

The USO’s Jacksonville Center has a room dedicated to the Beirut bombing victims. Deb Fisher, the center’s director, said during the aftermath of the attack, the relationship between the city of Jacksonville and Camp Lejeune Marines and sailors was strengthened.

Hunnicutt and Gibson still live in the Jacksonville area and agree the community has been a great supporter of Marines, both before and after the attack. But most survivors find their greatest source of comfort and support in each other, Hunnicutt said.

Lasting impression

As the devastation of Beirut aired on television screens across the country, Americans saw Marines respond with professionalism and strength. That’s what stuck out to retired Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who survived the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut just six months earlier.

Thirty years later, he said visiting the barracks after the attack was one of the most memorable experiences during his career as a diplomat.

Crocker went on to work alongside many Marines during his four-decade career in the U.S. Foreign Service, and he said he watched with admiration as a new battalion landing team was brought in immediately to cover for the one devastated by the attack.

“The Marine Amphibious Unit commander carried forward under this unbelievable loss with composure, demonstrating leadership, compassion and organization,” Crocker said. Beirut “was the Marines’ worst hour, and it was the Marines’ finest hour.”

Wednesday 23 October 2013

http://www.forbes.com/sites/agoodman/2013/10/23/on-the-30th-anniversary-of-the-beirut-marine-barracks-bombing-the-victims-families-are-close-to-receiving-1-9-billion/

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/article/20131022/NEWS/310220034/Echoing-through-history-lessons-Beirut-remain-relevant-today

continue reading

Mardan blast victims laid to rest as death toll hits 34

The victims of the Shergarh suicide blast were laid to rest in their respective areas as the death toll reached 34 on Wednesday.

Investigation Office Mumtaz Bacha said that 30 persons were killed while 96 sustained injuries in the suicide blast at the funeral prayer.

However, the locals said that the death toll was higher because some of the families had not shifted bodies of their relatives to hospitals.

Thursday 20 June 2013

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-184796-Mardan-blast-victims-laid-to-rest-as-death-toll-hits-34

continue reading

Families identify schoolgirl victims of Pakistani bus attack

Weeping relatives gathered yesterday to identify the charred remains of loved ones killed in a double attack in Pakistan's south-west.

At least 25 people were killed on Saturday when militants blew up a bus carrying female students in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, and then stormed a hospital where survivors had been taken for treatment.

A Sunni militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), which is responsible for a string of attacks against Pakistan's Shiite minority, said it was behind both attacks.

A LeJ spokesman said a female suicide bomber struck the bus, a rare tactic in Pakistan, before gunmen attacked the hospital, claiming the strikes were revenge for an operation by security forces this month.

Militants occupied parts of the Bolan Medical Complex in a standoff that lasted several hours and ended when security forces stormed the building, freeing 35 hostages.

Authorities shut down the hospital yesterday, moving patients to another facility, as investigators combed the grisly aftermath of the violence.

The intensity of the blast and subsequent fire reduced the student bus to a blackened skeleton, and outside the mortuary of the Provincial Sandeman Hospital, weeping relatives gathered to identify bodies.

The state of the bodies added confusion to the relatives' grief, as some were given contradictory information about their loved ones.

Mohammad Hamza, 19, said that on Saturday he had been given the body of his sister, only to be told a mistake had been made.

"I came here after someone had given us the information that we had taken the wrong body and my sister's body was still here at hospital, but it is not true," Mr Hamza said. It appeared the body he was given on Saturday was indeed his sister.

An LeJ spokesman called newspaper offices in Quetta late on Saturday to claim the killings.

Sunday 16 June 2013

http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/south-asia/families-identify-schoolgirl-victims-of-pakistani-bus-attack

continue reading

At least 93 lives lost in Quetta explosions

As many as 81 people were killed and 121 injured in suicide and car bomb blasts in Quetta’s Alamdar Road area on Thursday night.

Earlier in the afternoon, 12 people lost their lives when a bomb went off near a vehicle of the Frontier Corps at Bacha Khan Chowk.

A cameraman and a reporter of a private news channel, a computer operator of a news agency and nine police personnel, including two senior police officers, were among the dead, while 10 army and FC personnel were injured in the blasts.

A majority of the people killed in the Alamdar Road blasts belonged to the Hazara Shia community.

The banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi has claimed responsibility for the blasts.

“Eighty-one people have been killed and 120 injured, including 10 army and FC personnel, in two blasts,” Hamid Shakeel, Deputy Inspector General of Police, told Dawn.

The death toll might go up because the condition of several injured people was serious, he added.

Police sources said that the first blast took place in a snooker club on Alamdar Road when people were busy playing the game. Several people were killed or injured in the blast. “A man entered the snooker club and a powerful blast took place,” they said, adding that it appeared to be a suicide attack.

Police, workers of Edhi Trust and media teams rushed to the place soon after the first blast and started taking the injured to hospital.

A second blast took place 10 minutes after the first blast outside the snooker club when a large number of people, police and rescue workers gathered there. A majority of people were killed and injured in the second blast.

Five police personnel, including a senior police officer, and three media men also lost their lives in the second blast. Reporter Saifullah Baloch and cameraman Imran Shaikh belonged to Samaa TV, while computer operator Mohammad Iqbal worked for NNI.

Some other media men, who reached the site to cover the first blast, were also injured in the second explosion.

Imran Shaikh was the third Samaa cameraman to have lost his life in the line of duty. Earlier, Ejaz Ahmed Raisani and Malik Arif had been killed in bomb blasts.

Police said that an explosive-laden car parked at the roadside was used in the second explosion. Both the blasts shook the entire provincial capital.

“The building which housed the snooker club was destroyed completely, while over 50 shops and nearby houses were badly damaged,” eyewitness Khalil Ahmed said.

Two rescue workers were also killed in the blast, he added.

Soon after the second blast, power supply was disrupted in the area as wires snapped. “Bodies littered a large area,” another eyewitness Banaras Khan told Dawn, adding that several media men were missing. A DSNG of Geo TV was damaged in the second explosion. A cameraman received injuries while other staffers remained unhurt.

Rescue workers and security personnel faced difficulty in collecting bodies and in shifting the injured to hospital.

An emergency was declared at Civil Hospital and the Combined Military Hospital. Most of the injured and bodies were brought to CMH. The condition of at least 10 of the injured was stated to be critical.

“The death toll might increase,” hospital officials expressed fears.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Lashkar-i-Jhangvi told media from an unknown place that his organisation had carried out the two explosions.

Capital City Police Officer Zubair Mehmood confirmed at a press conference the killing of 81 people and injuring of 121 in the two blasts.

“A doomsday scenario was at the blast site. Bodies were lying everywhere.”

Mr Mehmood said that nine police officials had lost their lives.

Earlier in the afternoon, at least 12 people, including an FC soldier and a child, were killed and over 60 injured in a bomb blast before the night-time carnage shook the city.

The bomb was planted close to a parked vehicle of Frontier Corps at the crowded Bacha Khan Chowk. The blast rocked the entire city Several other FC men were injured in the blast, Balochistan Home Secretary Akbar Hussain Durrani told Dawn, adding that the condition of at least five people was serious.

Among the injured were two women and three children.

Frontier Corps officials confirmed that one soldier had been killed and 10 others injured in the blast. “We have lost one soldier in the blast and another is in critical condition,” a spokesman said.

An Afghan national, who hailed from Spin-Boldak, a border district of Afghanistan, was also killed in the blast.

The banned United Baloch Army has claimed responsibility for the blast. Its spokesman Mureed Baloch told newsmen that the blast was in revenge for Mashkay, Awaran and Bolan operations launched by FC.

The area where the blast took place is a populated and busy commercial junction where thousands of people come for shopping and doing business in Baldia Plaza.

“Thousands of people were busy shopping and in doing business in Baldia Plaza and in the Bacha Khan Chowk when the blast took place,” said eyewitness Mehmood Khan, who owns a shop in the area.

Police sources said that the bomb planted with a time device in a bag close to the FC vehicle went off at 3.10 pm, killing at least 10 people on the spot and injuring over 60.

Police and FC personnel cordoned off the place and took the bodies and the injured to Civil Hospital, where an emergency had been declared.

Two injured, including the FC soldier, died in hospital as they had received multiple wounds.

“The target of the bomb blast was the vehicle carrying FC men and a checkpost in the area,” said Capital City Police Officer Zubair Mehmood.

He told reporters that it was a time device. “We have collected evidence from the site and investigation is in progress,” he said.

Bomb disposal squad personnel said that 20 to 25 kg of explosives had been used in the blast.

Hospital sources said that 11 bodies and over 40 injured were brought to the Civil Hospital. Some of the injured had been shifted to CMH, Quetta. “We are trying to save lives of seriously injured people,” hospital officials said.

Most of the people killed in the blast were vendors and shopkeepers selling old clothes, rings, soup and other edible items outside Baldia Plaza.

Two Naib Tehsildars, who came from the Taunsa town of Rajanpur district in Punjab, were also killed.

Eight of the 12 dead were identified as Naib Tehsildars Ghulam Sarwar Qaisrani and Inayatullah, Mazuddin, Ziaul Haq, Fazal Ahmed, Sher Ali, Akhtar Mohammad and Tamour Shah.A man selling fruits on a pushcart had reportedly seen a white bag near the FC vehicle and informed the paramilitary force’s personnel before the bomb exploded. However, he remained safe, sources said.

The FC vehicle and about a dozen other cars and motorcycles were destroyed in the blast. About two dozen shops were damaged while windowpanes of several buildings and offices in Baldia plaza were smashed.

In 2004, an army truck was hit by a cycle bomb, killing 12 people, including security personnel.

In Sept 2010, a suicide bomber claimed over 30 lives during an Al Quds rally at Bacha Khan Chowk.

Friday 11 January 2013

http://dawn.com/2013/01/11/at-least-93-lives-lost-in-quetta-explosions/

continue reading

Bomber’s finger prints, legs and hands collected

The investigators have taken fingerprints of the suicide bomber, who hit a procession in Dhoke Seydan, to match it with the NADRA record.

The body parts of the suicide bomber, including hands and legs, had been collected by the Civil Defense Department from the blast place, were also being reconstructed and DNA would also be conducted to identify him, said City Police Officer (CPO) Azhar Hameed Khokher while talking to TheNation on Thursday.

“The limbs of the alleged suicide are collected at the DHQ preserved for DNA,” he added.

He said that the doctors have been assembling the body parts of the suicide bomber and have taken finger prints to match it with the NADRA record. “We have found two hands and two legs from the bombing place.”

Azhar said that the police found two hands and two legs from the bombing place and sent for tests to determine whether the parts of a one body or of different bodies.

Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 23 including the teenage suicide bomber while 34 injured.

According to data collected from hospitals as many as 34 injured were admitted to three different hospitals with 28 in District Headquarter Hospital (DHQ), 5 in Benazir Bhutto Hospital (BBH) and one injured in Holy Family Hospital (HFH).

Four injured persons admitted to the DHQ including a nine year old boy were said to be in critical condition. Rizwan Kazmi 9 has received fatal head legs injuries.

The head of the attacker said to be looking like a Pathan aging 17 to 18 years was also received at the hospital, said a senior doctor of DHQ.

Friday 23 November 2012

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/islamabad/23-Nov-2012/bomber-s-finger-prints-legs-and-hands-collected

continue reading

Nigerian church targeted in Easter bomb attack

A car bombing near a church in northern Nigeria on Easter Sunday killed at least 20 people and put the country on alert over fears of further attacks, rescue officials and residents said.

The explosion, a stark reminder of Christmas Day attacks that left dozens of people dead in Africa's most populous nation and largest oil producer, hit the city of Kaduna, a major cultural and economic centre in the north.

Motorcycle taxi drivers and passers by appeared to have borne the brunt of the blast, and body parts littered the area.

As news of the attack spread, security forces boosted patrols in key areas, including in the capital Abuja, where soldiers were sent to reinforce police posted near churches.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Details were still emerging of the attack, but at least one car said to be driven by a suicide bomber was believed involved. A rescue official speaking on condition of anonymity said two vehicles packed with explosives detonated.

"Now we have 20 dead from the twin explosions," said the rescue official, who was not authorised to speak publicly. Officials were still counting the number of wounded, he added.

"Bombs concealed in two cars went off just opposite this church," he said.

A police officer at the scene said a man believed to be a suicide bomber driving a car was stopped at a checkpoint near another church, the Evangelical Church of West Africa, and turned back.

KADUNA, NIGERIA - Apr 08 2012

http://mg.co.za/article/2012-04-08-church-targeted-in-easter-bomb-attack-nigerias-north

continue reading

Suicide bombers in Pakistan receive no death rituals

Suicide bombers who believe they will go to paradise are mistaken, Pakistani religious scholars say.

"Suicide bombers are the most unfortunate people on the surface of the earth, as they are neither bathed nor buried," as ordinary Muslims are when they die, said Maulana Aminullah Shah in Par Hoti Mardan.

Shah, a prayer leader in Mohallah New Islamabad, Par Hoti, Mardan, said he felt sorry for Rehmanullah, a 17-year-old suicide bomber who attacked Afghan and coalition forces last September and was buried without a funeral prayer.

Rehmanullah's father, Ghufran Khan, a day labourer, continues to grieve over his son's death, saying the Taliban kidnapped and brainwashed him. He never got to see his son's body or to bury it, and remains uncertain of his son's fate.

Some escape militant clutches

Saifullah, another boy from the same area, had to flee for his life when the Taliban accused him of informing intelligence agencies after senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj Al-Libbi was captured in Mardan in May 2005.

"The Taliban failed to abduct Saifullah, and finally he landed in Germany," said his father. "I know the Taliban would have used my son as suicide bomber ... he would have missed a bath, funeral and burial, which are important rituals for Muslims."

Ajmal Shah, a prayer leader in Daudzai, Peshawar, is blunt about the importance of those rituals.

"The act of suicide bombing is condemnable. All those blowing themselves up and killing innocent Muslims will not find a place in paradise as they had been promised by their trainers," he said of the promises the Taliban use to lure teenage boys into becoming suicide bombers.

Taliban brainwashing tools

Taliban recruiters kidnap or lure under-educated, jobless youth, using literature and videos to brainwash them into committing terrorism. They never tell the youths that they lose their birthright to a Muslim burial and funeral rituals.

They also misinterpret the Qur'anic description of paradise.

"It is a great (tragedy), those teenagers who think they invite the pleasure of Almighty Allah after committing suicide attacks," Shah told Central Asia Online. "In reality, they will face the wrath of Allah."





Ajmal Shah, (above) a prayer leader, said suicide bombers do not enter paradise, despite their handlers' promises, said. [Ashfaq Yusufzai]


"There is no disputing that suicide attacks are not allowed in Islam," he said. "Those disobeying divine commandments and opting to become suicide bombers ... land in hell."

Playing on the youths' religious sentiments, the recruiters call those targeted 'infidels' and issue decrees sentencing them to death. Families who grieve for their missing boys are told by trainers they have become "martyrs".

An ignoble end for bombers

Authorities treat the remains of bombing victims with care, said Dr. Shiraq Qayum, head of the Lady Reading Hospital Accidents and Emergency Department, observing that workers will exhume and re-bury initially unidentified victims when DNA techniques yield their names.

The remains of suicide bombers, however, are treated differently.

"… We never bury the remains of suicide bombers ... [we] just use them for forensic purposes," he said of Pakistan as a whole.

Suicide bombers do not merit a funeral because the public despises their acts, Qayum said. The contempt for bombers' remains is even more striking when compared to how Pakistanis' hold funerals in absentia for relatives who died abroad and whose bodies cannot be repatriated, he added.

"Assaying the role of suicide bomber means abandoning Islam, which clearly states that killing one person amounts to killing the entire humanity," said Rahimullah, a resident of Shabqadar and father of Qari Naqibullah, a 19-year-old Pakistani suicide bomber who killed 10 coalition soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in March, 2011.

A resident of Surkh Dheri Charsadda, Wahidullah, disappeared in January 2008. Two months later, a group of Taliban militants informed his elderly father, Juma Gul, that his son the "martyr" had gone to paradise.

"First, I did not believe it when the Taliban walked into the mosque early one morning," the father told centralasiaonline.com. "To my displeasure, they kept congratulating me, but I am still cursing them for my son's act."

Wahidullah's father had to mourn his son alone. "Offering condolences ... is an important act of kindness, displayed by the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and his followers, but I am very unlucky that I did not receive a single mourner over the death of my lone son," he said. "The people disapprove of suicide attacks; therefore, nobody offered me condolences."

Such deaths cause agony for parents, who have no hope Allah will extend mercy to their sons who blew themselves up and violated Islamic injunctions, he said.

Nobody ever says anything merciful like "May God bless him" or "God rest his soul" for suicide attackers, adding to their families' pain, Juma Gul added.

While suicide is forbidden by Islam, those who kill only themselves often receive the ritual washing, prayer and burial from their relatives. But the bodies of suicide bombers who kill others, go unclaimed and are denied the rituals in accordance with Islamic teachings, Shah and others said.

Another slight that suicide bombers suffer haunts their families forever. Since nobody will bury them, relatives and friends have no grave to visit for the purpose of seeking advice and contemplating the hereafter.

Thurs, 05 April 2012

http://mawtani.com/cocoon/iii/xhtml/en_GB/features/iii/features/iraqtoday/2012/04/05/feature-02

continue reading