Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
suits me, as your posts are not making sense in any case.
and urz are making alot of sense, 1st saying the roots are in fata and then saying peshawer, dont u know peshawer is not the part of fata :P
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
and urz are making alot of sense, 1st saying the roots are in fata and then saying peshawer, dont u know peshawer is not the part of fata :P
Is Peshawar in vacuum? Or is it next to Khyber agency where an operation is taking place for the past three years? Anyways (not surprisingly) you have again missed my point.
Re: Another bloody Sunday
exactly he is not pm but his party is in govt in kpk,** and every 2nd day he is cm house enjoying meals at of our tax money** , if he is has no concern with kpk he should ***off so should his party ,* a party who's cm didnt attended the flag raising ceremony on 14 august, then how we can HOPE that they might do something for us**
Lulz this is called Obession!
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Is Peshawar in vacuum? Or is it next to Khyber agency where an operation is taking place for the past three years? Anyways (not surprisingly) you have again missed my point.
nah its not in vacuum but its not in fata either, when I said that kpk govt is not doing anything then FATA WAS A FEDERAL concern, but now , again you are deviating from your statement , I told you earlier, by sitting miles away and giving your opinion is very easy , u dont know the ground realities, now again you came to my point of the ground realities from a long round way
Re: Another bloody Sunday
and your reaction is called ANKHAIN BUND KR LAINA 
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
who ever is behind this attack the government should expose and punish them and bolster the security/intelligence of the province.
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
These Attacks are done Just to weaken PTI but serious questions on security, i Just pray no more attack n Government should tackle this security issue.
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Every passing day and every sad incident is weakening the case for dialogues. Even though we have started noticing visible differences and contradictions in various taliban factions which strengthens the case for dialogues to isolate those wanna give peace a chance from someone who just won't even listen.
NS pehle zara indian pm se mil le, bohut zaroori hai.. cheeni sar rahi hai mills mayn. Hope he announces a concrete plan of action as soon as he returns.
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Noora tards are about to explore after reading this
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Former TTP spokesman E Ullah E said they are not involved. What is current spokesman S Ullah S saying?
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
We can clearly see a pattern here. TTP has now started to denounce the violence against masses to give more fuel to the conspiracy theory that these blasts are done by US/India/israle nexus to destabilize Pakistan. They will only take the responsibility for attacks on army ...many of their more militarized groups will keep on attacking poor masses but TTP will not own them!
forget consensuses
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Every passing day and every sad incident is weakening the case for dialogues. Even though we have started noticing visible differences and contradictions in various taliban factions **which strengthens the case for dialogues to isolate those wanna give peace a chance from someone who just won't even listen.
**
Why dont you say openly that you support Imran Khan stand of negotiating with good talibans...itna ghuma phiraa kar kiyon baat kar rahaya haian aap.....
but you have no answer to basic questions.....we have over 90 groups of talibans? who will determine which groups are willing to be peaceful? they have no central organziation, so who will ensure the peace treaty? more importantly didnt you see 30 conditions from TTP leader mahsood as per-conditions? did you even read them? these are the conditions from those groups who want to negotiate...all of them are non starters..
deep sigh!!!
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Inna lillaha wainna ilaihi rajioon. May Allah grant mercy on innocent people who are getting triggered by such non humans.
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
What a shame, govt announces talks and TTP starts talking in their language, someone tell them govt was talking about "peace" not "pieces".
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
Heart wrenching stories of those killed. 
Mourning replaces wedding celebrations - thenews.com.pk
Mourning replaces wedding celebrations
our correspondent
Monday, September 30, 2013
From Print Edition
2 0 0 0
PESHAWAR: Sartaj wept inconsolably over the death of his 17 family members visiting the Qissa Khwani Bazaar to shop and invite relatives to his son’s wedding when they were caught in the deadly car bombing.
At least 40 people were killed and 91 others injured in the devastating blast near the Khan Raziq Police Station in Qissa Khwani bazaar, which has witnessed bloodbath on a number of occasions. The family belonging to Shabqadar Tehsil in Charsadda district lost eight women, seven children and two men.
“My life has been ruined. I have lost my son, two daughters, wife and sisters,” Sartaj said as tears rolled down his cheeks. “The celebrations at our home have been turned into mourning,” he said while wiping his tears.
He said he was a labourer and was at his workplace when he came to know about the blast in Qissa Khwani. “They had come for shopping and to invite our relatives to the wedding of my son.
“They left home happily. None of us had thought that they will not return home alive,” he said as relatives tried to console him.“Most of our family members have been killed,” Sartaj said. However, the old man gathered courage to console his other son by asking him not to cry. “They were destined to die. We couldn’t have saved them,” he remarked.
“My beloved brother Akhtar Jan was also killed in the blast. He got married just six months ago. My sister-in-law and other family members have also died,” one of his relative said as he sobbed.
“If the law-enforcers want, no one can carry even a small quantity of hashish. How did the terrorists succeed in bringing such a huge quantity of explosives in the car despite numerous checkposts and barriers on the way,” asked another member of the bereaved family, Waleed Khan.
Weeping over the death of his relatives, he asked, “Who will bury them? Who will dig graves for them?” “My nephew asked me to buy him an ice-cream. I bought it and we sat down to eat it when suddenly a deafening blast occurred,” said Sajjad whose white clothes had soiled during the mayhem after the blast. Holding his injured nephew in his hands, he said that a cloud of dust rose in the air after the explosion and he was totally disoriented.
“The thud of the blast was so powerful that I couldn’t hear anything for some time,” he recalled.Sajjad, who was working in Saudi Arabia and had returned home on three-month leave, said he was sending money to Pakistan to make his contribution to help consolidate the country’s ailing economy.
“I and thousands of other people like me work tirelessly abroad to make Pakistan a prosperous and developed country, but the government has failed to protect its citizens against such dastardly attacks,” he lamented.
“We want peace. It doesn’t matter whether the government restores it through talks or force,” he added. “I heard a deafening blast as soon as I closed my shop to go home. An injured man rushed towards me and asked me to take him to hospital when the second blast took place. I just ran for cover,” said an eyewitness Imran Khan, who owns a shop in the fabled Qissa Khwani bazaar.“There was destruction everywhere. Vehicles and shops caught fire. The injured were crying for help and the limbs of the victims were scattered all over the place,” he said.
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
BBC News - Pakistan grandfather mourns 15 relatives killed by bomb
On Sunday morning, a bomb tore through a marketplace in the heart of the city of Peshawar. More than 40 people were killed and 110 injured.
Behind those horrific statistics lie appalling personal tragedies. What it did to the family of 61-year-old Sartaj, from the town of Shabqadar, was devastating in the extreme.
“At the site, someone found the mobile phone of my nephew, Sohrab,” Sartaj tells us, in the mourning tent by his home.
“He called me and asked my relation to Sohrab. Then he told me my nephew had been killed in the blast.”
‘Lost my mind’
With his voice breaking, Sartaj told how he and his son had rushed to Peshawar to pick up the body of Sohrab, only to be greeted by a nightmarish scene at the hospital.
"In the emergency ward, first I saw the body of my youngest son, then my wife, then it seemed like the place was filled only with the bodies of my relatives.
Sartaj’s murdered family
Fanwara, 49, wife
Meena, 30, daughter
Zainab, three-months, grand-daughter
Adnan, 14, son
Zaiby, 16, daughter
Khalida, 18, daughter
Sadia, 28, daughter-in-law
Hamad, 7, grandson
Junaid, 3, grandson
Sohrab, 22, nephew
Nargis, 50, sister-in-law
Haris, 9, nephew
Mumlika, 23, cousin
Aziz, 4, cousin’s son
Shagufta, 17, another cousin’s daughter
Bahar Ali, 23, driver
Peshawar market blast toll rises
The bombing of my childhood haunt
Bomb tears minister’s family apart
“They were everywhere. I just lost my mind.”
In total, Sartaj lost 15 members of his family. The youngest was his three-month-old grand-daughter, Zainab.
Five more of Sartaj’s relatives, four women and a child, remain injured in hospital.
The driver who was taking them through the old city of Peshawar was killed.
Their packed people-carrier was passing alongside the car bomb as it was detonated. Police estimate more than 200kg (440lb) of explosives were used.
The bomb crater remains, deep and wide. Buildings of the historic “Storyteller’s Bazaar” are charred, their facades blown open.
The day had started as a joyful one for Sartaj and his relatives. The women in the family in particular had been excited.
Sartaj’s son Dil Raj, 20, was engaged to be married, and as is the custom in the area his mother, sisters and cousins and their children were to visit other relatives together to invite them to come to the wedding.
They hired a vehicle and had decided to start with the relatives who lived in Peshawar’s old city.
“There was so much happiness in our house,” says Sartaj. “The ladies and girls bought new clothes. They were laughing as they left. But now they’re all gone.”
He talks of how he has been unable to enter his house since the attack.
“Yes, we are poor, but my home was like a garden of roses,” he says breaking down. “With our limited resources, we had a very happy life, but someone has burned my garden and locked it for me.”
Sartaj, of course, is as confused as any Pakistani as to why these attacks are happening and why they are targeting civilians like his children and grandchildren.
“If I blame somebody, how will it help me? If I scream, will it bring them all back?” he says.
“This incident was in my destiny: it was planned for me by God. If it had not happened to me, it would only have happened to someone else.”
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
The Qissa Khawani bazaar in Peshawar’s old city is known as the “marketplace of storytellers”. Local legend has it that invading armies, merchants passing through and other visitors spilling through the Hindu Kush gathered here, in the street between two rows of tightly packed, towering shops, to sip tea and trade tales.
When Sir Herbert Thompson arrived in the city as a magistrate in the 1920s, he was struck by the bustle. “From its waist the city swelled out into its second half which was served by the main gate,” he wrote, “the Kabul gate, at the end of the great shopping centre, the Qissa Khawani bazaar with its rows of matchbox-sized shops.”
Around that time, some of the bazaar’s most famous local residents left the city in search of fame in Bombay. They were storytellers of a different kind. In the Dahkki Nalbandi neighbourhood lived Prithviraj Kapoor, the famed Bollywood actor, whose children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are some of India’s biggest film stars. Shahrukh Khan’s father lived nearby, as did the actor Dilip Kumar.
Now, the bazaar that was once known as “the Piccadilly of Central Asia” lies deserted. The shopkeepers, who eventually replaced the storytellers, colonial officers and film stars, are left to survey the ruin. Outside a vast electronics store, there is a crater four feet deep. It was created when a car exploded, carrying nearly 250kg of explosives, phosphorus and artillery shells. The nearby mosque is badly damaged, as is the post office across the street.
Naveed Qureshi was sitting in his shoe store across the street when it began to shake fiercely. He went out on to the street to find roaring flames. “And there were piles of bodies, and body parts, everywhere.” At least a dozen shops were destroyed. An entire family of 18 people, shopping for a looming family wedding, was killed.
The deaths of over 43 people in Peshawar last Sunday came just days after two other major bombings in this storied frontier city. Two days before, a bus carrying government employees to the city was bombed, killing 17 people. And on the previous Sunday, Pakistan’s tiny and beleaguered Christian community suffered its worst-ever attack, with over 80 people killed by two suicide bombers.
A Pakistani volunteer searches the bomb scene (Getty) A Pakistani volunteer searches the bomb scene (Getty)
Faced with this unrelenting assault, the citizens of Peshawar have begun asking questions of their seemingly rudderless leadership. The government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (of which Peshawar is the capital), have insisted they want to negotiate with the militants. But as local residents point out, the militants don’t seem interested in talking.
The bazaar is a mere stone’s throw away from the 19th-century All Saints Church. When the bomb went off, the parishioners solemnly sitting in their pews became terrified once again. They thought it was a repeat attack, and let out screams of panic until they realised this time it wasn’t them.
Inside, the clock still says the time is 11:43. It stopped working when the blast happened. In the church’s courtyard, one bomber struck by the steps leading out of the Sunday school, where young children were gathered. Another struck the congregation coming out of the church.
The parishioners of this elegant, domed, Mughal-designed church fear the worst isn’t over. “We’re very worried that there will be more attacks,” says Jamil Naz, a member of the local Christian community. “Imran Khan is talking about letting the Taliban open an office for negotiations. That will be the worst thing.”
If the Taliban are allowed to open an office, adds Mr Naz, “they’ll be given more space to operate. Then there’ll be more attacks.” The city of Peshawar voted overwhelmingly for Mr Khan in the May general elections. They said they wanted change, and were war-weary. This is not the first time Peshawar has been under siege, with militants menacing the city in 2008 and 2009.
But the mood has changed. The shopkeepers of the Qissa Khawani bazaar say that the police came to warn them about an impending attack last Friday. “They said that a car was wandering around,” says Zafar Yab, the owner of a shoe store. The police didn’t offer any protection, Mr Yab recalls, incredulously. They wanted the shopkeepers to protect themselves.
The famous Qissa Khawani bazaar in Peshawar, before the blast (Alamy) The famous Qissa Khawani bazaar in Peshawar, before the blast (Alamy)
The bazaar has seen much violence before. In 1930, British troops opened fire on a group of non-violent Pashtuns involved in the freedom struggle. The death toll was as high as 400, according to some estimates. Later, the leader of the movement, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, would remark that an unarmed Pashtun was more threatening to colonialists than an armed one.
In recent years, there have been at least four other bombs set off in Qissa Khawani bazaar. And within the old city that surrounds it, there have been at least a dozen. Sometimes the only mercy for the victims is that there is a well-equipped hospital nearby, the Lady Reading Hospital, named for the Marchioness of Reading in the 1920s.
When an explosion happens, ambulances roar through the narrow streets. But once they reach the Lady Reading Hospital, an elegant compound with manicured lawns, they aren’t guaranteed emergency attention.
Pakistani Christian’s protest following the suicide bombing of a church in Peshawar (Getty) Pakistani Christian’s protest following the suicide bombing of a church in Peshawar (Getty)
As Dr Shiraz Afridi, the director of emergencies, explains, there simply aren’t enough resources to cope with the increasingly frequent bombings.
The “walking wounded,” he says, have to wait. “The people who are near death, or will die soon, and won’t survive, are also separated.” The attention is given to the broad chunk in between: the people who are too wounded to walk and still have a chance at living. It’s one of the busiest casualty wards in the world: they see over 2,000 patients a day. And like the shopkeepers, they speak of dealing with one crisis before bracing for the next.
For the residents of Peshawar, the country’s politicians are failing to grasp the gravity of the threat. “Nawaz Sharif says the Taliban haven’t claimed responsibility,” says Sheikh Yusuf, another shopkeeper with a thick beard and eyes that fitfully bulge with rage. “Fine. But someone else did. And let’s say you want to negotiate with one group, but another keeps bombing you. What do you do then?”
Omar Waraich is a fellow with the International Reporting Project
Re: Twin blasts in Peshawar claim 28 lives
A Widow’s Plea To Taliban: ‘Don’t Snatch The Shawls From Our Heads’
Four-year-old Sudhais is too young to understand the meaning of death. However, he easily realizes that his “Baba” (father) has not come home for the past several days.
Sudhais fastens his eyes on the house’s main entrance as soon as the clock ticks five in the afternoon. Full of hope, he then forces his dejected mother to take him out to call for his father. His insistence soon turns into cries when he doesn’t see his father standing behind the main gate with a few small gifts and a plastic bag full of seasonal fruit.
This is the story of the youngest son of an unfortunate schoolteacher, Haroon-ur-Rashid, who along with 18 other people lost his life in a bomb blast on September 27.
Haroon was on way home from his duty station in a bus carrying employees of the Civil Secretariat in Peshawar, a northern Pakistani city bordering Afghanistan, when a bomb ripped through the bus, killing 19 people and injuring over 40.
And in June 2012, an identical attack was carried out on a bus carrying employees of the Civil Secretariat and Haroon was among those critically injured. He was lucky enough to dodge death that time, but not so lucky when “unidentified” attackers planted another bomb on a bus on which Haroon happened to be traveling.
It was sheer luck that he escaped the first attack and sheer misfortune that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time on September 27. In Pakistan in general, and the northern areas in particular, many people believe they face the prospect of death at any time, mainly because of the increasing terrorist attacks in cities and the adjacent tribal areas.
Two days after Haroon’s death, a powerful car bomb went off in Peshawar’s historical Qissa Khwani Bazaar, or market of the storytellers, killing 42 people, including 15 belonging to the same family.
The family members of one Malak Taj, including women, children, and two men, had gone to Peshawar from the Charsadda district to extend invitations to their relatives and family friends to attend a marriage ceremony scheduled for October 20.
Sitting in a van, the 15 family members were passing through the Qissa Khwani market when the huge explosion took place. Like Haroon-ur-Rashid, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Haroon’s wife says they were extremely happy when he survived the first blast in June 2012. “I was in a state of shock when someone told me once again about a blast and my husband’s death,” she says. “I couldn’t believe my ears… I still can’t believe that he is dead… Everything seems like a nightmare to me.”
Haroon left behind three sons and a widow. He was the sole earner of the family. His elder son, 9-year-old Haris Khan, says his father “used to help us with our school homework in the evening. He used to bring gifts, sweets, and fruit for us.”
In Pakistan, it has become the practice that the government announces compensation money for families of those killed and injured in terrorist attacks. The usual amount announced for a dead person is 500,000 rupees ($5,000) and 100,000 rupees ($1,000) for an injured person.
Haroon’s younger brother Hammad says 100,000 rupees was promised by the government to Haroon’s family when he was injured in the first bombing, but they were offered a check for only 10,000 rupees.
The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province has announced an amount of 500,000 rupees for those killed and 100,000 rupees for those injured this time. As Haroon was not lucky enough to survive the second blast, his family will be offered 500,000 rupees, although Haroon’s wife says she does not need anything from the government.
**“The only thing I want from the warring sides is don’t snatch the shawls from our heads,” she begs as her voice chokes and tears roll down her cheeks. “For God sake, stop this war and let us live in peace.”
**
(Note: The “snatching of a shawl from a woman’s head” means to not kill a family’s breadwinner, meaning husbands, fathers, and brothers.)
– Daud Khattak