PESHAWAR: The bomb disposal unit (BDU) of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police defused 361 explosives in the first half of this year. Out of the explosives defused, one was suicide jacket, one remote-control bomb, six time devices, 234 were hand grenades and 119 were rockets. The highest number of explosives, 115, were defused in Mardan during the first six months of this year while 87 were defused in Peshawar, 55 in Kohat, 31 in Lower Dir and 11 each in Malakand and Dera Ismail Khan.
“We have formed dedicated BDU units for each district, including erstwhile Fata districts. We imparted BD training and provided them with requisite gadgets and equipment,” BDU Assistant Inspector General Rabnawaz Khan told The News.
He added that each unit is capable of defusing and handling explosive materials when required. The BDU was a small squad of a few experts working within limited resources and no incentives for risking their lives until it was made a proper unit when the province was hit by terrorism almost 15 years ago. The job of bomb disposal men is one of the toughest in the world. The experts of the BDU risked their lives on innumerable occasions to save the lives of the general public.
On several occasions, the terrorists planted a second bomb as a booby trap to target these bomb disposal experts. A booby trap is an apparently harmless object containing but contains an explosive device designed to detonate when someone touches it.
A team of BDU experts rushed to Daudzai a few years ago after an earlier explosion that martyred a policeman, Nazir. As a BDU expert Zahid was searching for explosives near a makeshift police post, set up for the security of the anti-polio vaccinators, another Improvised Explosive Device (IED) was found.
Police officials recalled when the BDU official was defusing the IED and went close to it, the explosives went off. The cops ran towards the expert when he fell down on the ground after the explosion.
However, the protection gear, which the BDU experts normally don’t use due to its weight, saved Zahid from being killed or critically wounded.
There are a number of BDU experts who were martyred or critically wounded when the explosives they were defusing went off in the last many years.
They included some of the top experts like Inspector Hukam Khan and Inspector Abdul Haq.Hukam Khan was martyred while defusing explosives in Matani near Peshawar.
Abdul Haq was martyred along with three of his men when their car was attacked with an IED in Badaber after being called to defuse another IED. The two along with their teams defused hundreds of explosives during their lives. Despite sacrificing lives, the BDU experts continued to risk their own lives. The experts of the unit have saved innumerable lives by defusing explosives since 2009.
As per the record of the BDU, 137 suicide jackets and 4653 explosive devices were defused from 2009 till 2021. The bombs defused included 456 remote controlled explosive devices and 586 timed explosive devices as well as hundreds of rockets and hand-grenades during the period.
This figure does not include the attacks foiled in the erstwhile Fata by defusing explosives as the police were extended to the former tribal areas only a few years ago.