Tarbela bomber’s head, body, bicycle recovered
By Javed Iqbal & Mushtaq Yusufzai
GHAZI/PESHAWAR: Senior military officials investigating the blast at the mess of the Special Services Group of Pakistan Army's Special Operation Task Force at Tarbela have termed it as a suicide attack after recovering the body and head of the suicide bomber from the scene. The head was split into two pieces.
A bicycle on which the suicide bomber reportedly came to the SSG base was also recovered from the spot. Almost after 20 hours of the deadly incident, police officials, who were earlier denied entry into the base, were finally given permission by the military authorities on Saturday to go there and take part in the investigations.
Also, a sepoy, Ismail, lodged a formal First Information Report of the incident with the Ghazi police against the unknown attacker on Friday. On the directives of President Pervez Musharraf and Defence Minister Rao Sikandar Iqbal, a joint team of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Military Intelligence (MI) started investigation into the blast at the SSG base.
After initial investigation by the military officials in the Special Operation Task Force (SOTF) premises, a senior official of the investigation team told The News on condition of anonymity that it was a suicide attack, in which a young bearded person blew him up inside the mess at a time when it was jam-packed with 250 commandos dining there.
Over 20 SSG commandos were killed and 42 others injured in the incident. Many of the injured are under treatment at military facilities in Attock, Kamra and Rawalpindi. Investigators said the blast was so powerful that many of the injured commandos had either lost their eyesight or hearing ability.
According to the official, the suicide bomber was dressed in a white shalwar, qameez and had worn a white cap on his head when he entered the mess. Sepoy Ismail, an eyewitness of the incident, told the investigators that the young suicide bomber parked his a bicycle in front of the mess and entered the dinning hall.
"No sooner had he entered the mess when I heard a huge blast and saw the roof of the mess flying in the air," he told investigators. Officials said there was no crater in the mess and felt there would have been many more human losses had the roof collapsed and fallen on over 200 people there.
Ismail, who belongs to the SSG's Karar company, said since many civilians from the nearby Wapda residential colonies used to come there either for eating or taking food from the SSG mess to their homes, he took the bomber as one of them.
In their findings, investigators found that security lapses in and around the SSG base had enabled the suicide bomber to easily enter the highly sensitive area and carry out his mission. They said there was no check on civilians coming from adjacent Wapda colonies to take food from the mess or wash their clothes at the SSG laundry.
Interestingly, it was also disclosed by the investigators that majority of the houses in the Wapda residential colonies had been rented out to civilians by the Wapda employees which was a serious threat to the security of the country's biggest dam.
"Nobody knows who is living in which house. The trend of providing accommodation to private people in such a sensitive location could pose serious threat to the dam," remarked the officials.
They also termed the security plan of the dam by a few unequipped police personnel as dangerous for the dam, which the Interior Ministry has declared A category security zone, a status enjoyed by Pakistan's nuclear plant. "The staff is inadequate and lacks basic equipment like scanning machines and steel detectors," they observed.
