Daily Times

KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah on Monday briefed the provincial assembly on the details of the report carried out on the Sehwan blast which killed nearly 100 people.

The minister informed the legislature that deployment of police forces at the shrine, on the night of attack, was insufficient. He further made the astonishing claim that a “VVIP” had taken police personnel, deployed in the area, away with him almost half an hour before the attack took place.

“I don’t want to spell out, who had taken police with him about half an hour earlier,” Murad said.

Refusing to take names, the chief minister only specified that the person he was referring to was not a politician, as he added “I don’t want to blame anybody”.

Murad said that there had not been any specific security threat regarding Sehwan and the area around it though he did concede that the provincial authorities should have been extra vigilant after the blast at the Shah Noorani shrine in Balochistan’s Khuzdar district last year that claimed 52 lives.

He added that the CCTV camera surveillance at the shrine was intermittently hampered by loadshedding, though he absolved himself of responsibility for the problem.

Because the cameras were being run on generators, he said, their resolution was affected. “Due to low voltage from the generators, the CCTV footage had turned black and white from colour,”he said.

“Despite that, we identified the suicide bomber from the same camera,” he added.