Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: A letter addressed to the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Anwar Zaheer Jamali by the former CJP Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry with reference to the Quetta blast has been filed with registrar Supreme Court (SC) office. It has been said in a letter filed through Sheikh Ahsan ud Din that August 8, 2016 will go down as the blackest chapter in the history of Balochistan, when a suicide bomber killed 74 people and injured 150.

The terrorists targeted president Balochistan Bar Association Bilal Anwar Kansi, and when his friends, many of whom were lawyers, reached the hospital, a suicide bomber conducted a bomb blast. This disastrous incident could have been averted had the hospital been sealed by erecting a security shield. Failure to do so caused a huge loss of human lives.

Better planning needs to be evolved to avoid such devastation or to guard against the recurrence of such bloody incidents. We should take a leaf out of the books of developed countries in this regard. Balochistan has remained embroiled in difficulties in the past and is home to domestic and foreign terrorists. The sitting provincial government is not capable of overcoming the situation. The hospitals in the province lack the facilities of doctors, apparatus and medicines. Operation theatres and trauma centres are next to nil in the hospitals of the province.

No action worth mentioning seems to have been taken to rein in the terrorists. FIRs are registered only against unknown persons and later it is filed due to failure to identify culprits and to make arrests. No arrest has been made following the occurrence of Quetta tragedy. Only an FIR has been registered against unknown persons.