Security or harassment?
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Dawn, Pakistan, Saturday, 04 Jul, 2009
A SUICIDE bomber rammed his motorcycle into a bus carrying employees of the Kahuta Research Laboratories in Rawalpindi on Thursday, mercifully resulting in the death of only the attacker. At least 40 were injured, some critically. Simply yet another horrifying attack to be condemned and blamed on the militants? Not quite. A report in this paper has suggested that the four check-posts on Peshawar Road where the latest suicide attack took place are ineffectual and, worse, a magnet for unscrupulous elements in the police force looking to shake down ordinary civilians. “Innocent people are apprehended at one post and released at the other after ‘investigations’ and payment of what some of the police victims called ‘ransom’.” This is simply outrageous. A suicide attack on March 16 killed 10 people on the same road, and Rawalpindi generally has been attacked repeatedly in recent times. The very point of security check-posts is to make the city safer, not to harass the innocent. And with the threat to the city from militants still at an all-time high, it is doubly damning if inefficiencies and a business-as-usual approach to policing are allowed to reign.
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A SUICIDE bomber rammed his motorcycle into a bus carrying employees of the Kahuta Research Laboratories in Rawalpindi on Thursday, mercifully resulting in the death of only the attacker. At least 40 were injured, some critically. Simply yet another horrifying attack to be condemned and blamed on the militants? Not quite. A report in this paper has suggested that the four check-posts on Peshawar Road where the latest suicide attack took place are ineffectual and, worse, a magnet for unscrupulous elements in the police force looking to shake down ordinary civilians. “Innocent people are apprehended at one post and released at the other after ‘investigations’ and payment of what some of the police victims called ‘ransom’.” This is simply outrageous. A suicide attack on March 16 killed 10 people on the same road, and Rawalpindi generally has been attacked repeatedly in recent times. The very point of security check-posts is to make the city safer, not to harass the innocent. And with the threat to the city from militants still at an all-time high, it is doubly damning if inefficiencies and a business-as-usual approach to policing are allowed to reign.
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Labels: Security, Suicide Attacks, Taliban, War on Terror
posted @ 9:56 AM,
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