Sania who died in Kharadar blast was home-based worker who embellished dupattas

The funeral prayers for 30-year-old Sania, the mother of four children who lost her life in a terrorist explosion in the Boulton Market area of the city on Monday night, were offered on Tuesday.

A large number of people attended the funeral prayers that were offered after Zuhr near her residence located near the Shoe Market in the Garden area. The woman was later laid to rest at the Mewashah Graveyard.

Sania’s husband, who works at a medical store nearby, and other family members were reluctant to engage with the media and were seemingly unhappy at the media coverage. However, her father had a brief talk with the media after the funeral prayers, in which he said that his 30-year-old daughter was the mother of four children – two sons and two daughters — aged between four and 12 years.

He added that Sania was a home-based woman worker. “She used to put embellishment on dupattas at home and sell them in markets.” The father explained that on Monday, she had gone to the market to buy clothes and the blast occurred when her son had stopped a rickshaw to get back home from the market. As the rickshaw stopped, he said, it caused a traffic jam in the street and a police van started to blow horn to tell the rickshaw driver to park the vehicle on a side.

“The police mobile van was clearly the target of the blast but due to the rickshaw, the cops in the van remained safe” he said. “After the blast, my daughter sustained injuries in her chest which caused her death.”

An improvised explosive device (IED) strapped to a motorcycle had exploded at the parking lot of a cloth market in the Boulton Market area on Monday night, leaving the woman dead, and injuring 14 others, including three policemen.

The explosion occurred four days after a similar IED blast in the Saddar area left a teenage boy dead and nine injured. For the explosion, terrorists had planted an IED on a bicycle that was parked on Daudpota Road. The device was detonated as a Coast Guards vehicle came near the bicycle.

Earlier on April 26, three Chinese teachers and a Pakistani van driver lost their lives and four others, including two Rangers personnel and a Chinese tutor, were wounded when a female suicide bomber, Shari Baloch, of the Majeed Brigade of the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army exploded herself outside the Confucius Institute of the University of Karachi.

The BLA claimed the responsibility of the KU blast while Saddar’s bombing was claimed by the Sindudesh Revolutionary Army. No militant outfit has so far claimed the responsibility for the Boulton Market blast but the investigators believe that separatist groups of Sindh and Balochistan are behind this terrorist incident as well.

The Counter-Terrorism Department’s (CTD) in-charge, Raja Umer Khattab, told the media that the Saddar and Boulton market bombings were similar. Police investigators have also traced the owner of the motorcycle used in the Boulton Market blast. The initial police report reveals that the motorcycle owner, Parvez Rehman, died six months ago.

During a raid on a flat in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, the investigators learnt that the motorcycle was given to a servant of the deceased named Sabir. Police conducted a raid in a nearby slum for the arrest of Sabir but he had escaped before the police arrived, and his mobile phone number was also found turned off.

The bomb disposal squad has prepared its initial report, suggesting that the remote-controlled IED contained four-kilogrammes of explosives, including ball bearings. The explosion caused damage to the police mobile van, rickshaw and five motorcycles. The case of the blast is likely to be registered at the CTD.