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Tuesday, August 15th, 2006south asia images
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
Begum Nawazish Ali dazzles on Pakistan’s first transgender hosted show
Jessica (Shona) Lall in her modelling days. In the spring of 1999, Manu Sharma, the son of a politician, shot her at a swanky restaurant in Delhi, India. Seven years later, in December 2006, after a series of trials, Sharma was sentenced to life. He now lives in Tihar jail.
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About
Monday, August 14th, 2006sonya fatah is a journalist based in south asia and canada. she has written for publications in north america, in south africa and in south asia. she is currently based in new delhi, india, writing primarily for the canada’s most widely read newspaper, the toronto star, on south asia.
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India braces for more terror
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006Reprisal strikes feared after train blasts kill scores of people, injure hundreds more
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
DAN McDOUGALL AND SONYA FATAH
Special to The Globe and Mail, with a report from Umarah Jamali in New Delhi
NEW DELHI and TORONTO — India is bracing for reprisal attacks today after a string of bomb blasts struck at seven spots along Mumbai’s commuter rail line, killing more than 190 people, injuring hundreds more and raising fears of sectarian violence.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called yesterday’s attack “evil” and “cowardly,” but also appealed for peace between Muslims and Hindus as suspicion fell on Muslim extremists.
“I urge the people to remain calm,” he said, “not to believe rumours and carry on their activity normally.”
Indians, however, were preparing for the worst.
“I have closed down my shop early today,” said one Muslim shopkeeper near an area of Mumbai where militant Hindus are active. “I think I shall not open my shop for [the] next few days. . . . If Muslims did this, they are doing it wrong. They are acting against the teachings of Islam. Islam is against any violence against innocent people.”
No group had taken responsibility yesterday for the bombings, which killed at least 190 people and injured more than 600.
Police officials said last night that they had no idea who masterminded the attacks. although many senior officers quickly pointed the finger of suspicion at Muslim militant groups fighting to wrest the predominantly Muslim and disputed Kashmir region from India.
Indian officials blamed one such group for a bombing attack at a New Delhi market last October that killed more than 60 people.
One analyst suggested that the recent improvement in India’s relations with the United States, culminating most recently in an agreement to share nuclear technology, could have given militants extra impetus to carry out yesterday’s attack.
“Anybody seen to be part of the U.S. camp automatically becomes a target of Muslim extremists,” said Ashok Mehta, an independent security analyst based in New Delhi. “You could see many more attacks in India.”
Yesterday’s bombs struck mostly passengers in the first-class carriages of the busy Western Railway and were timed for when the trains were at their busiest, shuttling workers home from work in India’s financial capital, formerly known as Bombay and the embodiment of India’s rush to modernize.
There were conflicting reports on the exact timing, but the explosions began shortly after 6 p.m., and struck in rapid succession at seven sites, with two bombs at one location.
It was unclear last night whether the blasts were the work of suicide bombers, as was the case in the London transit attack that killed 52 people just more than a year ago, or planted explosives, as with the Madrid train strikes that killed 191 people in March of 2004.
Gruesome scenes from yesterday’s attacks dominated Indian television, which began referring to the day as 7/11. Images of a middle-aged man, his body severed in two, crying for help as his fellow passengers carried him away, were broadcast repeatedly. Shoes, handbags, clothes and other items littered the railway tracks. Body parts were strewn everywhere. Some of the victims were said to have jumped from exploding rail cars, only to be struck by other trains.
Survivors last night told of massive explosions and scenes of devastation.
“We heard a loud blast in one of the train compartments. When we rushed there and looked, we saw people with severed limbs and grievous injuries,” one survivor said, standing outside a local police station in a blood-soaked shirt. “There were no police or railway people to help and we had to carry the victims onto the street and into rickshaws and cars to get them to hospital.”
Things were no less chaotic at the hospitals, where the dead lay in hallways covered in white sheets on blood-soaked floors as medical workers scrambled to attend to the streams of wounded.
The massive rescue effort required to bring the dead and injured to nearby hospitals was hampered by heavy monsoon rains, a shortage of ambulances and the lack of a co-ordinated emergency response system.
In response to the attacks, authorities put Mumbai and the capital New Delhi on high alert and beefed up security across the country. Police set up checkpoints in bazaars and public places across the country’s major cities, and increased patrols in sensitive areas in an effort to ward off potential clashes in areas with large Muslim populations.
The Mumbai blasts came hours after seven people, including six Indian tourists, were killed by suspected Islamist militants in a series of grenade attacks in Srinagar, the capital city of the disputed territory of Kashmir over which India and Pakistan have fought three wars.
India has accused Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf of being too soft in his war against terrorism, and says Pakistan is not doing enough to rein in terrorists infiltrating India through the Kashmiri border to carry out attacks. Both Gen. Musharraf and Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, however, were quick to condemn the attack. “This despicable act of terrorism has resulted in the loss of a large number of precious lives,” a spokeswoman for Pakistan’s foreign office said.
Terrorist attacks are not new to Mumbai. During the last decade there have been a series of strikes against the public. In March of 1993, 13 bombs went off, one of them in the city’s stock exchange. More than 250 people died and thousands were injured. Authorities pinned those attacks on the city’s underworld of organized crime. Crime boss Dawood Ibrahim has been a fugitive since. Indian authorities say he is hiding in Pakistan.
In an effort to maintain calm across the city, authorities called on people to resume their daily lives. Schools would be open as usual. And although a handful of long-distance trains scheduled for departure from Mumbai yesterday were cancelled, the targeted railway had resumed all its suburban services by midnight.
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Ex-detainee accuses officials of abuse
Saturday, April 29th, 2006Saturday, April 29, 2006
SONYA FATAH
Special to The Globe and Mail
A Newmarket man who was detained for five weeks as a threat to Canada’s security — and then released this week when federal lawyers dropped the allegation — accused prison and security officials yesterday of abusing and harassing him during his time at the Toronto West Detention Centre.
Raja Ghulam Murtaza spoke at a news conference organized by his lawyer.
Mr. Murtaza said he was arrested while he was leaving his house for dinner on the evening of March 16. He was not given a reason for his detention, he said.
“They asked me if I had changed my name from Raja Ghulam Mustafa to Raja Ghulam Murtaza. I said, ‘Yes.’ But they didn’t ask me why I changed my name.”
While in detention, Mr. Murtaza said, he was the victim of repeated verbal abuse, threats and profanity.
During his first interrogation, Mr. Murtaza said, he was asked three questions.
His interrogator asked him where he was from. Pakistan, Mr. Murtaza said he responded.
“Then he asked me, ‘Are you from Pakistan?’ I said yes. ‘Then you are a terrorist,’ he told me.”
Tarek Fatah, communications director of the Canadian Muslim Congress, also spoke at the news conference.
“People should be addressed by their names, not by four letter words,” Mr. Fatah said.
“Everyone in the Pakistani community feels terrorized.”
Mr. Murtaza said his run-in with immigration officials has left him a marked man.
“They put it in the news that I am a terrorist. Now I don’t have a job because no one wants to hire me,” he said. Mr. Murtaza was employed as taxi driver in Newmarket at the time of his arrest.
Asked whether he was a terrorist, he responded, “Not at all.”
Mr. Murtaza said he is from Toba Tek Singh, a town in the Pakistani province of Punjab, which is a major recruitment centre for the Pakistani army. His four brothers are in the Pakistani army, and he served seven years, rising to the rank of captain, he said.
He said that he angered Pakistani officials by voicing his criticism of corruption and bribery within the armed forces.
Mr. Murtaza said he escaped to the United States, where his application for refugee status was rejected.
Afterward, he crossed the border into Canada and changed his name to Murtaza from Mustafa to avoid trouble.
“I do not want to go back to Pakistan,” said Mr. Murtaza, adding that he fears deportation and any subsequent repercussions for desertion.
Mr. Murtaza, along with his girlfriend, Rose, and others, have suggested that Mr. Murtaza’s ex-wife, Fatima, called immigration officials and reported that he was a terrorist.
The couple split up some time ago; Mr. Murtaza said they are divorced under Islamic law.
Their son, Bilal, 6, lives with his mother in Texas. Their daughter, Iqra, 7, lives with her paternal grandparents in Toba Tek Singh.
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‘All the children in our village are gone’
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005Small border towns like Kashmir’s Pahal among districts hit hardest by quake
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
SONYA FATAH AND MASSOUD ANSARI
Special to The Globe and Mail ISLAMABAD, BAGH — The body of Mir Hasan’s 11-year-old daughter was pulled from the crumpled heap of what was left of the building where she was learning to read and write.
Mr. Hasan joined others in Pahal — a tiny village of about 1,000 people, straddling the boundary of the Pakistani and Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir — in the frantic search through the rubble of what had once been a school but became, in the violent seconds after the earthquake shook this mountainous region last weekend, a mass grave for the countless young children caught inside.
By one of those fickle tricks of fate, Mr. Hasan’s six-year-old son, Owais, survived. He was outside the school, filling up a bottle with water from a tap when the earthquake tore through Pahal.
But his little boy’s survival was the tragic exception in the village, where an entire generation has largely been wiped out. “All the children in our village are gone,” Mr. Hasan wept, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Four hundred people, about 40 per cent of his town’s population, died, he said.
There are many little towns like Pahal spread across the mountainous landscape of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, which bore the brunt of the earthquake’s wrath and where, in many places, help has yet to arrive.
School buildings appear to have been particularly vulnerable. Tariq Mahmood, minister of works and communication, estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 primary, high-school and college buildings were destroyed in the Kashmir region and school-aged children represent a disproportionately high part of the death toll, now approaching 23,000.
Without proper equipment, many grieving residents have been forced to dig with shovels or by hand through the heavy debris, in an effort to rescue trapped loved ones, or recover bodies for burial.
Shahida Mughul, 40, doesn’t have a shovel, but has been scooping out the wreckage with her hands, uninterrupted for the past three days. Silently, she lifts concrete slabs one by one, shoving them aside, searching for her two daughters who, along with their schoolmates, were trapped under the building here.
For a while, after the building’s collapse, they could hear crying from deep within: “Mai Hamain Bacaho [O mother save us].” But for the past day or so, the cries for help have been replaced by an eerie silence. Mad with grief, survivors in the town can be seen beating their heads and chests, the air broken by haunting sobs of mourning.
The bloodied head scarves of the schoolgirls can be seen in the rubble, as well as books and school bags. Some bodies can be seen, eyes and mouths open. The stench of decomposing flesh fills the air.
“It’s the biggest natural disaster. It has totally paralyzed Kashmir,” Sikandar Hayat, the Prime Minister of the disputed Kashmir region under Pakistani control, told Reuters in a tent on the lawn of his official residence in Muzzafarabad. “For the first two days, we have been either digging ground to recover bodies or digging to bury them. . . . Kashmir has turned into a graveyard.”
Fifteen members of Mr. Hasan’s family in Pahal lost their lives in the earthquake. But among those of his family and neighbours who survived, several have waited for days to receive treatment and aid.
When Mr. Hasan heard the sounds of rotor blades slicing the thin mountain air on Sunday, the day after the earthquake, he thought rescuers had arrived to bring relief to Pahal’s residents. But on closer inspection, Mr. Hasan realized the helicopters weren’t headed in his direction. The helicopters he sighted were Indian ones on their way to provide relief on the Indian side of the line of control. It would be two more days before a rescue operation would reach his town.
Brought to Islamabad by Chinook helicopters, about 20 residents of Mr. Hasan’s town lay under an army tent on multicoloured makeshift bedding, awaiting transportation to local hospitals. Among them was Sabina, 15, Mr. Hasan’s niece, who wanted to walk even though her right leg had just been amputated below the knee. Six-year-old Owais sipped slowly on a carton of apple juice as flies clung to the blood-clotted wound on his forehead. His left leg, injured when the school collapsed, had swollen to three times its size. But he was one of the few children alive.
“No one knows the extent of the damage,” Mr. Hasan said. “Ours is only one town. We saw them. They are all destroyed.”
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