We have only begun to recount the multiple events of December 28, but the Ashura bombing alone demands some explanation.
Authorities made their first efforts to assign some meaning to the blast well before the day reached its disastrous conclusion.
Early media reports quoted government officials who blamed a “suicide bomber”. Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik said that the bomber had links to two militant groups, including Pakistan’s version of the Taliban.
The Taliban soon claimed responsibility, also describing it as a suicide attack. Evidence, however, began pointing in another direction.
Federal investigators studied steel nuts that were strewn on the road – the same ones Faisal Edhi had noticed – and the nuts made them doubt that a suicide bomber was responsible.
Hundreds of nuts were too heavy to carry as shrapnel. When choosing a final wardrobe, investigators believed, the discriminating suicide bomber would prefer lightweight ball bearings.
Karachi police gained more analysis in the days that followed when a businessman came to see them. He brought along a computer scientist, a Fulbright scholar back from getting his doctorate in the United States, where he had studied the computer reconstruction of suicide bombings.
After the police took the scholar to study the corner by the banyan tree, the young man said that the “casualty pattern” didn’t fit with a suicide attack.
Even more proof came in the form of torn metal fragments. They originated from the box of Quranic scripture. Video images from before the blast showed an Edhi ambulance parked beside the box.
Images taken afterward showed the ambulance crumpled like an aluminium can, but still parked in place. The box was gone, blown apart, with pieces flung outward in all directions.
The explosion could only have come from inside it, likely detonated by remote control. A dead boy who had been mistakenly described as a suicide bomber was identified as a Boy Scout.
Police eventually dismissed the Taliban as suspects, instead linking the attack to a little-known Pakistani militant group with ties to al Qaeda.
We will see as our story unfolds that this militant group was originally organised to punish Pakistan’s government for cooperating with the United States in hunting down militants.
So if the police were correct, we can read the attack as one bloody episode in al Qaeda’s long war with the West.
But on another level, the Ashura bombing had little to do with the West. No Americans were targeted. The bombers did not even directly strike America’s allies in the Pakistani government, instead wiping out common citizens on the street.
People in the United States barely noticed the attack, which received only brief coverage in the midst of the American holiday season. (Americans were far more concerned about the so-called underwear bomber who’d been caught with explosives in his pants on a US-bound plane that Christmas.)
The Ashura bombing was instead an atrocity staged for a local audience, in which attackers and victims alike were Muslims.
We may better understand it as part of a long battle within Islam, as well as a struggle for power in Pakistan. The details of the attack – the targeting of a vulnerable minority, the state’s failure to provide effective security, and explosives placed with awful symbolism in a box of damaged Qurans – reflected disturbing trends through much of the modern Muslim world.
They also reflected Pakistan’s own peculiar problems. In this expressly Islamic state, well over 90 percent of the populace shares the same basic faith, yet throughout Pakistan’s history, as we will see, that surface unity has masked great diversity and deep divisions.
The divisions are especially evident in Karachi, which, after receiving migrants from many places, is Pakistan’s most diverse city.
Karachi also faces a diversity of conflicts, which came into play after the Ashura bombing. A second event extended the day’s destruction, and revealed more of the competing pressures that shape the instant city.
Rival politicians, businessmen, soldiers, and thugs jostle for power and land. Religion, while often invoked, is just one of several social divides; people are at least as likely to be split by their class, the location of their ancestral village, or the language they speak at home.
Few people trust the government to mediate their differences. All these conflicts combine and intensify one another, like pouring chemicals on a building that’s already on fire, creating unpredictable conflagrations that define life and death in Karachi.
A conflagration on December 28 left scars that were visible for months afterward along Jinnah Road. When I moved along that road from the banyan tree in 2010, one of the first buildings I came to was the old city hall.
At the curb behind it, I discovered a line of pickup trucks belonging to the city fumigation service. Each truck bed carried insecticide-spraying machinery.
The windows of each truck’s cab were broken, and the insides blackened by fire. “Eighteen,” a security guard said when he noticed me counting trucks. “There are eighteen of them.”
Farther down Jinnah Road, I found long stone buildings, three and four stories high. This was a wholesale district. Anything from clothes and chairs to appliances and balloons was sold in hundreds of shops along Jinnah Road.
But I saw gaps in the otherwise crowded landscape. Daylight showed through the archways on the façades of a row of stone buildings.
Through the doorways, I saw a field of rubble. The buildings behind the façades were gone. Next to the rubble was a piece of corner real estate that I knew had held a market not long ago.
Now it was a parking area covered with motorcycles. I turned onto a narrow side street, which led into an even narrower street, where the buildings offered shade and shelter from the brutality of the sun.
Here I encountered a shopkeeper named Khalid Rashid. He wore the Pakistani clothing known as a shalwar kameez, a long loose shirt over baggy pants, with white fabric as sweat-stained as my own shirt.
Rashid had bags under his steady dark eyes. His moustache curved upward in a smile. Though we’d never met, he sent someone running for a cold drink and welcomed me into his plastics shop.
He sold simple items like stools; we spoke while sitting on two of them. But he had very little inventory that day.
Rashid was just beginning to repair the place, where he’d done business from 1971 until December 28, 2009, when the shop burned during a massive episode of arson.
The fires spread along the route we have just traced, beginning at the banyan tree. Minutes after the Ashura blast, people began breaking into the closed stores in the Lighthouse Bazaar.
They pried open the corrugated metal gate to a store selling bolts of cloth and shiny men’s suits. The shop reached far back into the building; the men set it all on fire.
Other shops were torched the same way. Some people crossed the street from the bazaar to the old city hall. They smashed the windows of the city fumigation trucks parked by the building and torched them one after another.
Soon the flames reached a portion of the building itself. Fire trucks began arriving within minutes, but the crews were quickly driven away by the enraged survivors.
“There was fire all around,” remembered Faisal Edhi of the ambulance service. “I was there about one and a half hours. We were asking the fire brigade to fight against the fire, but they were not present there; they were afraid to come.” They only came later, and “the markets were burned by that time.”
The thousands of police and paramilitary troops along the route made little effort to control the situation, choosing instead to make a tactical retreat.
In the video room at the Civic Centre, Bobby Memon and the police officials saw the chaos unfolding and made no effective response.
In Memon’s view, it was a simple lack of coordination. “We always talk about that in a city like Karachi, there should be a central command system; they should have a camera working; and that should be linked to the barricade – should be linked to the ambulances – linked to the hospitals. And that’s only where you can respond to a crisis situation,” he said.
Any police officer watching those screens “was just in there watching. If something happened, what were they going to do?”
Other accounts suggested that the chain of command worked only too well – and that it restrained the police from acting.
A Pakistani newspaper, The News International, reported that police requested permission to shoot the arsonists and were refused.
Officials feared that if they responded to the violence with force, the situation would escalate and the whole city would explode.
During that first hour after the blast, two dozen or more men appeared on Jinnah Road. Many were about a mile ahead of where the parade had stopped – on the far side of the old city hall.
Here they stood between long grand buildings of yellow stone – Gizri stone, it was called, after the location of the quarry that produced it.
This was the wholesale district, known as Bolton Market. The men broke into National Arms, a store that had sold weapons on this spot since 1948, and made off with Chinese- and Turkish-made handguns.
They broke into a second gun store. Some men had torches. Soon entire buildings were in flames. Television crews broadcast much of this live, which was how the shopkeeper Khalid Rashid learned of the destruction of his property.
Rashid began the Ashura holiday at home. There he saw video images of the fires, and told me that “the Rangers and police were there, but were saying they couldn’t do anything.”
Like other shopkeepers, he rushed to Jinnah Road, but was blocked by the police who had cordoned off the area. Behind the police cordon, the fires were spreading.
“We said if you are unable to do something, give your weapons to us and we will defend our stores,” Rashid recalled. “We tried to come, but the police turned us aside. Not until 10 o’clock in the evening did we get here and see what happened with our shops.”
Rashid’s shop was destroyed and smoking; across the narrow street, a five-storey building was burning. He told me how he watched as the fire worked its way downward from the top.
“Five floors! Then it burned the fourth, then the third, step by step down to the ground.” The building was full of plastic goods that burned uncontrollably.
Once the fire crews felt secure enough to operate, they moved from one burning building to another, yet the fires did not die.
Mustafa Kamal, the young mayor of Karachi, moved among the fire-fighters, offering exhortations and encouragement.
It was much too late. The fires burned all night and for several days afterward. Hundreds of shops were destroyed. More than a dozen people were killed in the chaos on the streets.
“Who do you think did all the burning?” I asked Rashid, the plastic seller. “I just don’t understand,” he replied.
He reminded me that the fires in the Bolton Market only seemed to have spread to one side of Jinnah Road. “You will see that all the shops on the right side are affected. Not a single shop on the left side was burnt. Not a single shutter was broken.”
That was one of many observations that shopkeepers made to each other as they speculated that certain buildings or blocks might have been deliberately targeted.
A question began forming in their minds – a question without any firm foundation, but one shopkeeper after another was asking it. Was someone trying to clear off certain properties for later use? Their question was spreading like the fires.
Flames and smoke still rose over Bolton Market, visible for miles through Karachi’s haze, as police began to investigate.
Agents from Pakistan’s equivalent of the FBI arrived up the street at the Lighthouse Centre; we have already glimpsed them, peering at steel nuts and dead bodies.
They were joined by the special investigations unit of the Karachi police, which handles terrorism cases. The anti-terrorism specialists who focused on the bombing case did not examine the fires at all, classifying them as, essentially, unrelated crimes.
“There are two different things,” said Raja Umer Khattab, a senior superintendent of police, when we talked about the case.
“One is the blast, and the second is after the blast.” He told me that separate investigators were assigned to the fires, and their examination produced only the arrests of a few Shia Muslims, in line with the police theory of the case – the fires were set by people in the procession who were enraged by the bombing.
This explanation appeared to satisfy almost nobody outside the police force. Abbas Kumeli, the Shia Muslim leader, argued that the theory made no sense.
Granted, the Shia marchers were standing there at the Lighthouse Centre, where some of the fires took place, but the marchers were nowhere near the Bolton Market.
Why had the worst fires been set there? Why would angry Shia marchers walk past a mile of buildings and leave them all untouched, then start lighting fires again? In the absence of a convincing official explanation, people were already supplying their own.
In search of more information, I visited the local office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. To get there, I had to climb a set of concrete stairs to an open-air walkway, overlooking a courtyard.
Off to my right stood the half-demolished stone façade of some 19th-century building from British colonial times. To my left was an apartment building, darkened by pollution, but full of life.
Half a dozen girls crowded onto one of the balconies, giggling as they taught each other how to put on makeup. Their laughter reverberated across the courtyard, which had been turned into a parking lot, blocked by a red-and-white gate and watched by riflemen who provided an illusion of security.
In the commission’s offices, the electricity had gone out and the temperature was around 40.5 degrees Celsius. The man I had come to see led the way to a conference table in the breeze near an open window.
His name was Abdul Hai. In the days after the fires, he was part of a Human Rights Commission team that conducted its own interviews with shopkeepers and others.
Their report, released on January 9, 2010, included this provocative paragraph – After interviewing and listening [to] the sufferers’ point of view, the team was of the opinion that the burning and looting was pre-planned and was done by 25 to 30 persons who were fully trained and were possessing steel cutters, tools, fire arms and chemicals. It is very important to note that [the] procession of mourners after the bomb blast passed away and there was none of them at burning and looting sites.
An operation that was pre-planned? It was a strong statement in an otherwise carefully worded report. A covering note minimised its key finding.
“This report is a mere compilation of the views of people affected directly by the attack.” Not, in other words, any sort of official conclusion.
Abdul Hai made a copy of his report on the Ashura bombing and gave me a chance to look it over. He emphasised again that the report simply passed on the claims of shopkeepers.
“I have no opinion,” he said, gradually becoming more vague and evasive, or so it seemed to me. I pressed him politely.
He was a professional; he knew Karachi; he had talked with victims, some of whom may have witnessed the fires; he had even issued this report.
What did he think might have happened? Who was responsible for burning several blocks of the city? Some kind of mafia, he said. And who might that be? “Ah,” he said, in a tone that suggested, ‘Now there’s the hard part.’
“Everybody knows, but nobody will tell you,” he said. “These mafias are all under the shelter of the police.” As I moved across the city asking questions, it sometimes seemed that Abdul Hai had it right – everybody knew, but nobody would tell.
Usually, however, it seemed to be the other way around. People across the city opened their lives and their hearts to me.
Many were eager to tell me what happened that day. I just wasn’t sure if anybody knew. Pakistan is a land that embraces conspiracy theories.
Of course, the people of any nation, including America, can display a paranoid streak, and Pakistanis seem especially susceptible given their national history of repeated coups and covert wars.
After the Ashura fires, everybody seemed to have a conspiracy theory. One came from Faisal Edhi. “I think it was a conspiracy to cause a clash between Shias and Sunnis,” he told me.
He believed that the burned shops belonged to Sunni Muslims, who were deliberately attacked in tandem with the bombing of the Shia procession.
Maybe so; though, I later met a Shia shop owner who had also lost everything. Other theories implicated the city’s two leading political parties.
The major parties had armed wings as well as links to various criminals. One notion pointed to the city’s ruling party, Mayor Kamal’s party, the MQM.
Some hypotheses said that the MQM destroyed the shops of political opponents, or tried to repossess land for the city’s use. No proof emerged.
Another theory blamed arsonists under the protection of the MQM’s political rivals, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP.
That wasn’t proven either; although, the police and Rangers, who failed so miserably to stop the fires, were under the authority of PPP government ministers.
When I met with Raja Umer, the police investigator, I asked about the claims of storekeepers and other witnesses, who believed that chemicals had been poured on the fires to accelerate the burning.
People traded stories of arsonists wearing gloves and holding weapons. “No, no, this is wrong,” said Raja Umer.
“Totally wrong. People said that those who were burning the shops were wearing gloves they kept with them so they would not leave fingerprints. But after investigation, it was decided that there was a medical store that was broken into.”
I asked him if they were wearing surgical gloves. “Yes,” he said. And the fires burned so fiercely not because of chemical accelerants, but simply because the buildings and their contents were so flammable.
“It was a chemical market, a plastic market, clothes market – so it can burn easily. There is no evidence we can get about chemicals used for burning.”
Raja Umer’s assurances did not prevent members of Karachi’s elites from casting their own suspicions. One of the more chilling theories came from Yasmeen Lari, a woman who was well connected to Karachi’s political establishment and among the city’s most distinguished architects – she was known as “the first woman architect in Pakistan.”
She led Pakistan’s Heritage Foundation, dedicated to preserving historic buildings and other artefacts; when thousands of old documents were found in that giant pile in the city hall clock tower, it was Yasmeen Lari’s foundation that organised an effort to begin preserving and archiving them.
She also went into action after the fires. She rushed to the ruined markets, many of which were in buildings dating back to colonial times.
City officials were inclined to tear down what little of the buildings remained, but she sought to save historic façades.
And this work led to her theory – she, like the shopkeepers, believed that somebody wanted the land beneath the stores.
“I’ve come to this conclusion,” she told me, “because MA Jinnah Road is now prime commercial land. These buildings are three or four stories high. They were burned down to try to see if, you know, a multi-storey tower could be put up in their place. Because as soon as we got to the site, within a few days, although we were offering that we would try to raise money for them to restore the buildings, these owners kept on saying to me, ‘Don’t worry, we have no problem of money, we have people who are sitting there saying they will build it for us.’ So the question is how come?”
Many of the buildings were full of shopkeepers whose families rented space at exceedingly low rates, having held on to their shops for generations.
It would not be unprecedented for real estate owners to seize a chance to burn out tenants. “There is a huge mafia in this city,” Yasmeen Lari said, “which really wants to get this prime piece of land to build these multi-storey towers. I have no doubt in my mind there was a great conspiracy.”
I heard an even darker version of this theory from Arif Hasan, a Karachi urban planner and architect who was writing a five-volume history of his city.
Hasan was a broad-faced and solid man, whose stern expression somehow carried with it a hint of mirth. Sitting behind the white table in his home office, Hasan spoke in his quiet and precise voice.
“Land mafias” had been growing in power for many years, he said, seizing real estate by any means and maximising its value.
“Our politicians became a part of it,” Hasan said. At first the politicians were in control of the mafias, or imagined that they were.
“But then the Bolton Market tragedy happened,” he said, “and that showed our politicians that the mafia was stronger than them.”
Hasan had identified something that drove a city when it grew this rapidly – drove its economy, its politics, its conversation, its dreams and its nightmares.
Real estate was the heart of the instant city in the early 21st century. It was a swiftly growing city’s true faith, a source of passion, hope, mystery, and superstition.
Even if all the conspiracy theories were completely wrong (and certainly none was ever proved), the political result was the same.
The abruptly vacant land took centre stage in the political debate. Even the bombing of the Shias prompted less comment than the real estate.
A reporter for The News International wrote a few days later, “Within an hour of the Ashura blast, which tragically was quickly forgotten, the battle for prime real estate of Karachi began in earnest.”
Shias were always being killed in Pakistan. But real estate on Jinnah Road did not become available every day. The question of what to do with the Bolton Market land instantly became a problem for everyone, including Karachi’s mayor, Mustafa Kamal.
It even attracted interest and money from the United States. When I thought about Arif Hasan’s theories of the Bolton Market fires, I recalled something he’d told me a couple of years before.
He compared the situation in Karachi to man’s ancient lust for gold. “Land has replaced gold,” he said. “Everything that was done for gold is now done for land.”
A few months after the fires, Hasan was invited on a talk show on a local television channel and offered his views on land mafias in Karachi.
Soon afterward, his telephone rang. He answered, and heard his name spoken by an unfamiliar voice. “You don’t know who I am,” the caller said.
“I am a well-wisher. I have enormous respect for you; you are a great asset to this country, but there are many things you don’t understand. We have heard your television statements. They are factually incorrect; you have been misinformed. And we would like you to remember that although we respect you very much, we have to live in the same city.”
“Is this a threat?” Hasan replied. “Are you threatening me?” No, the caller said. “How can we threaten you? We love you so much. We’re just asking you to understand that we have to live in the same city.”
Hasan said that he was sorry if he caused offense. The caller bid Hasan a courteous goodbye, saying that he hoped that they would meet someday.
Fire crews put out the last of the flames after hundreds of shops were destroyed, but it would be harder to tamp down the political debate.
The People’s Party claimed that the MQM had failed to properly mobilise the fire crews, which were under the control of MQM politicians.
The MQM said that the People’s Party had failed to unleash the police. This distraction came at a moment of great tension, when the People’s Party, the MQM, and other political parties were manoeuvring against each other for the long-term control of Karachi.
The provincial law that had created the local government was about to expire. The parties disagreed on whether and how to renew it, and their indecision raised the possibility that the mayor, the city council, and every other elected official could see their offices changed or even abolished.
The moment was even more dangerous because Karachi’s political parties were generally divided between ethnic groups – or more precisely language groups, because each major group had its own tongue, such as Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Balochi, and Pashto, and language was the way many defined themselves.
A man’s political rival was also his blood enemy, implicated in ethnic warfare that had gone on for decades. And so it should not have been surprising that, with the authorities overwhelmed, the political war of rhetoric was accompanied by a hail of bullets.
The day of mayhem on December 28 would be followed by numerous days of gun battles between members of political parties across the city.
The year 2009 was an unusually deadly one for politicians and activists, hundreds of whom were killed, but the monthly pace actually increased in January 2010, according to figures compiled by the Human Rights Commission.
During that month, 37 deaths fell under the heading of “targeted killing”, which was the typical phrase for the shootings by gunmen who rolled away on motorcycles.
Twenty-six more deaths were labelled “political workers killed”. These figures included a political worker who was beheaded in early January.
Were the killings related? Unrelated? Who really knew? Many people had theories, but few of the crimes were ever solved. Nor would the city have much time to recover from the killings.
Forty days after the December 28 bombing and fires, a Shia procession began that was linked to the first. This march, on February 5, 2010, marked the end of the ritual period of mourning for the long-dead Imam Hussein (RA).
Again Shias began assembling from across the city, carrying banners and coffin sheets, preparing to be summoned again to their faith by stories of sacrifice and loss.
Again the police and Rangers made elaborate plans and formed layers of security. Police sent out advisories to be prepared for trouble. Shopkeepers rolled down their metal gates. People waited, asking each other what would happen.
Seemin Jamali, a Karachi doctor, was inside her home that afternoon. “I was watching the television, but I heard this blast myself,” she recalled.
“All the windowpanes of our house were shaking, and there was a strange kind of vibration in our home. And I just knew that it was the sound of a blast.”
Dr Jamali looked at her husband, who was also a doctor, and they did what they always did in such circumstances. They stood up and went in to work.
For more than 20 years now she had worked at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, a free public hospital in Karachi.
When I met her there, Dr Jamali wore a green dupatta, a scarf that Pakistani women use for modesty – sometimes covering their hair, sometimes letting it fall around their shoulders.
She wore a glittering stud in her nose. Her eyes were alert to the constant motion in the emergency department, as doctors walked among the patients on wheeled gurneys.
She kept a photo of her children at the side of her desk. In a roomful of gurneys outside Dr Jamali’s office, a sign read, “CAUTION! Display of Weapons is Strictly Forbidden in the Emergency Department. By Order of Incharge.”
For some years now, the person in charge had been Seemin Jamali herself. She was the director of the emergency department.
On February 5, when she felt the explosion at her house, she went to the emergency room and waited for the ambulances to arrive.
The drivers pulled up just outside the sets of glass doors that led to the reception desk, and gradually, the details of the bombing filtered in.
This time a motorcycle with explosives on board had been placed near a busload of mourners. “First, we received the dead,” Jamali told me.
There had been no triage at the scene of the explosion, no effort to select the casualties who most urgently needed attention; so the first ambulances came with corpses.
“Next, we had the walking wounded; we had everybody coming in ambulances to the hospital, and in minutes they were given first aid.”
A dozen people had been killed, and dozens more wounded. They arrived attended by scores of angry and wailing relatives.
It was a heavy toll, but Dr Jamali had seen worse. The hospital was well prepared, having received an alert from the police to expect the possibility of violence during the procession.
As the gurneys rolled in, loaded with stunned and bleeding people, doctors swiftly evaluated them and made decisions.
Some were sent upstairs to the operating theatres. Others went to various hospital wards, making room for those who would follow.
More ambulances arrived, and from the cab of one of them, stepped Abdul Sattar Edhi, the patriarch of the Edhi ambulance service, who had come to see the tragedy for himself.
The old man was unmistakable in his simple black clothes and his flowing white beard. He was no doubt wearing the wry expression that he carried even into the worst situations.
Edhi once told me, “I feel happy to drive an ambulance with a dead body behind.” He had, with the help of a writer, published a memoir that went on at some length about his willingness to wash dead bodies, and his distaste for those who refused to touch them.
In his mind, such people were hypocrites, in the same class as bigots and politicians and those who looked down on the poor.
Dr Jamali spotted Edhi and stopped what she was doing, showing proper deference to an elder of such great stature.
She took him around the emergency room where some patients were receiving initial treatment. Dr Jamali guided the old man back through the two sets of glass doors and out to the driveway, where she bid him goodbye.
She believed that he had gone away, but Edhi told me later that he took a seat inside one of the Edhi ambulances that were parked outside the entrance.
The parking area was a strip of asphalt running along the side of the building. It was narrow. Little convenience stores were across the way, topped by blue Pepsi signs.
So it was a constricted space, with ambulances coming and going, wheeled gurneys sitting on the sidewalk, and crowds of family members arriving to ask after injured relatives.
And after seeing off Edhi here, Dr Jamali encountered a complication. A number of prominent Shias arrived at the emergency department.
“Their leaders came and said that the government has announced compensation and free treatment at one of the private facilities”, a hospital that would normally be out of reach for most of the victims.
“Now, that is where the commotion started.” People in the crowd began shouting all at once. Some wanted their relatives moved from the public hospital right away.
Dr Jamali did not think it was wise to move anyone through “all of this mob”, but finally consented, and began to think of her plans to remove the wounded.
She saw off a city official at the entrance, then spun around and stepped back through the glass doors. She turned her head to begin giving instructions to a member of her staff.
As Dr Jamali spoke to her subordinate, as the crowd milled in anguish, and as Abdul Sattar Edhi rested his feet, they did not know that a motorcycle was parked and unattended near the entrance to the emergency department. It had a strange-looking object strapped behind the seat.
Extracted from the book ‘Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi’ authored by Steve Inskeep.