Barbarism -- pure and simple

The barbaric killing in Karachi of four Americans and their Pakistani driver was an act of outrage that has sent shock waves within and beyond Pakistan. The five victims, employees of Houston-based Union Texas Petroleum, were ambushed in the heart of violence-plagued Karachi and sprayed with bullets by assailants who then fled the scene of crime, abandoning the stolen car they had used for the terrorist attack. From the details so far known about this act of violence in the country's most lawless city, it is apparent that this was no random killing. It appeared to be a well-planned and precisely-executed targeted killing.

There is an extraordinary similarity between the circumstances surrounding this attack and the one that claimed the lives of two U.S. consulate personnel on Mar. 8, 1995. The 1995 attack occurred just two weeks before the visit of the American first lady, Hillary Clinton. It followed the extradition to the U.S., a month earlier, of Ramzi Yusuf, wanted in connection with the World Trade Center bombing.

This time the killing of American nationals took place on the eve of the visit to Pakistan of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Its immediate background was the conviction by a court in Virginia, U.S., of Mir Aimal Kansi for the 1993 murder of two CIA officials.

The nature of the victims and the timing of the attack provide strong clues about the motives of the terrorist attack even though, as usual, the police remain clueless in Karachi. Obviously, since not enough information is yet available about the entire circumstances of the Karachi killings it would be unwise to jump to hasty conclusions or succumb to the plethora of conspiracy theories that usually flourish in Pakistan's fertile breeding ground.

However, there is a point to be made — on the basis more of logic than fact — that depicting the attack as retaliation to Kansi's conviction appears too pat and simple. It may be that this is what the assailants wished everybody to think. An interesting fact in this regard is that the car the terrorists used to carry out their dastardly deed was stolen well before news about Kansi's conviction broke to the world. This seems to establish the terrorists' intentions before the Kansi conviction. Moreover, the precision with which the attack was carried out seemed the work of a professional terrorist group, not a rag-tag tribal revenge squad.

This raises the question, also raised in 1995, whether those who carried out the attack did so using the Kansi affair as a convenient cover or alibi to deflect attention away from clues about their identity. Naturally, these are questions for the investigating

Go To Page: 1 2