Seven Dead in Attack on Pakistan Christian Charity

September 25, 2002
By Aamir Ashraf

KARACHI, Pakistan (Reuters) - Two gunmen burst into the offices of a Christian charity in the Pakistani city of Karachi Wednesday and tied up and gagged seven Christians before shooting them at point blank range, police said.

The attack was the latest in a series of bloody assaults on Christian or Western targets since Pakistan's military government sided with the U.S.-led war on terror last year.

Six men died instantly, and doctors said a seventh died shortly afterwards at Karachi's main hospital. Police said the seven, all Pakistanis, were shot through the head at point blank range with a pistol.

Doctors said an eighth man faced permanent paralysis of his left side from a head wound and needed an operation, while a ninth was under sedation after being beaten up in the attack.

The attack took place at the city center offices of the Idare-e Amn-O-Insaf, or the Organization for Peace and Justice.

"The gunmen first roped all the people inside the room, they also taped their mouths," a police officer told Reuters. "After, they fired straight at their heads."

"The dead bodies were found lying on chairs," said provincial police chief Syed Kamal Shah. "It appeared that they were forced to sit there. Their hands were tied and their mouths were also taped."

"We found eight empty bullet shells of a TT pistol which means that they were shot point blank," he said.

"Apparently it's an act of terror," Shah added. "But we are investigating it with an open mind and don't rule out a possible link with recent attacks on minorities and foreign nationals."

The charity has its offices, which are unmarked, on the third floor of Rimpa Plaza, a 12-storey block which also houses a hospital.

A doctor in the next-door office said he had seen two gunmen. "They were wearing shirts and trousers and were clean shaven," he said.

SCENES OF GRIEF AT HOSPITAL

As a large crowd gathered around the office, the bodies were brought out wrapped in white sheets. Blood dripped off the stretchers carrying the dead men, and there were large blood stains around their heads.

At the hospital female relatives of one victim wailed and beat themselves in grief.

An employee of the organization, Sakina Rahmat, cried at the bedside of her wounded colleague. She usually starts work in the afternoon and had not been there at the time of the attack.

"We don't know how it happened," she said through her tears. "We have no enmity with anybody. How could this happen to us?"

Father Archie d'Souza, personal assistant to the Archbishop of Karachi, said Idare-e Amn-O-Insaf was a Christian organization. "It's a sort of NGO. It's Pakistan-based and run by Pakistani Christians. It's for justice and peace."

Rahmat said the charity dealt with social and labor issues, while police said it also published a magazine called "Jafakash" (Hard Worker). A recent issue dealt with Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws, Shah said.

Shah said police were keen to question the ninth man, who was beaten but not shot in the attack, but he had fainted shortly after they began interviewing him.

This year's attacks have been blamed on Muslim militants angered by the government's decision to abandon the fundamentalist Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan, which was overthrown last year.

Pakistan has arrested more than two dozen members of extremist groups in connection with the attacks, but at the weekend Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider told Reuters he suspected the intelligence services of neighboring India might have financed them.

Analysts were skeptical that India might have been involved.

"You cannot entirely rule out that possibility," said Khalid Mehmood of the Institute of Regional Studies. "It's a war of nerves between the two intelligence agencies and intelligence agencies all over the world are involved in such tit-for-tat operations."

"But in the context of these incidents, I would say this appears to be the work of Islamic religious extremists rather than the involvement of any Indian secret service," he said.

Wednesday's attack came a day after two gunmen attacked a Hindu temple in Gujarat, western India and killed at least 29 people. Indian Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani has implicitly blamed Pakistan for that attack.

In March, a grenade attack on the Protestant International Church in Islamabad killed five people, including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat.

On May 8, a suicide bombing killed 11 French naval engineers and three Pakistanis in Karachi. A car bomb outside the U.S. consulate on June 14 killed 12 Pakistanis.

On August 9, four Pakistani nurses and an attacker were killed in an attack on a Christian hospital in the town of Taxila. Four days earlier six people were killed by gunmen who burst into a school for the children of foreign missionaries in the resort town of Muree.

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