Indian team was the real target

[Dravid]

i agree... target was prob us......uneducated pakis, who only know how to bomb, and cant read ****, prob didnt get the memo.. they went after players in blue

[cochise]

cochise, do u think our policmen wud have averted this had it happend here in India..?

Yes, I do. After Mumbai, this was the level of security we were offering the England team: http://cricket.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Specials/England_in_India/News/Tight_security_for_Mohali_Test/articleshow/3850171.cms

MOHALI: Light-machine guns (LMGs), aerial surveillance, gun-toting commandos, road check-points, a safe house and an emergency exit plan in place. The description is not that of a war zone but of the venue of the second Test between India and England to be played at the Punjab Cricket Association (PCA) stadium from Friday. The December 19-23 Mohali Test match would be held under the tightest-ever security for a sporting event in the country, senior Punjab police officials said. Hundreds of commandos, quick reaction teams and armed policemen have already taken positions in and around the PCA stadium in Mohali and the Taj Hotel in Chandigarh's commercial hub of Sector 17, about 10 km from here, to protect both teams. The security arrangements are in a completely different league, compared to the last Test played here, between India and Australia in October. Both teams arrived on Tuesday at the Taj Hotel in Chandigarh on a chartered flight from Chennai, where India won the first Test. Four Indian players, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Ishant Sharma and Amit Mishra will join the team later on Wednesday. "The teams will practise at the PCA stadium on Wednesday and on Thursday," PCA secretary GS Walia said. The Chandigarh police and the Punjab police have drawn up elaborate plans for team movement and their security. No vehicles will be allowed on the roads 10 minutes prior to the movement by either team to reach the stadium from the hotel or while returning. The team buses will be accompanied by scores of armed policemen and several pilot and escort vehicles. The police vehicles will also have LMGs. "The roads around the hotel have been blocked completely. Floodlights have been installed all around the hotel," Chandigarh's assistant superintendent of police Madhur Verma said. Nobody else is being allowed to park inside the hotel, which is swarming with nearly 300 commandos and armed policemen. Others staying at the hotel have been given special passes so that they can get back. No one else has been allowed to book a room on the floors where the teams are staying. No player would be allowed to move out of the hotel or the stadium alone. Near the PCA stadium, the police are checking antecedents of all residents. Till Dec 24, the residents are likely to feel they live in a very high security zone indeed. "Every match is anyway a nuisance for us. We cannot even take the usual roads to reach our homes. This match is going to be a security nightmare for us," said Avtar Kaur, who lives near the stadium. "Security, of course, will be tightest ever. We have forwarded security instructions for the players to PCA officials. Every player will have to adhere to that," Mohali police chief Jatinder Singh Aulakh said. The police have even made and rehearsed an evacuation plan in case of an emergency. A building near the stadium has been earmarked as a safe house in such a situation to ensure players' safety. From Monday, the stadium and the hotel have been kept under tight surveillance day and night. PCA officials are now trying to ensure some spectators do brave the security cordons and show up to watch the players in action. Since the match was allotted to Mohali only at the last moment, tickets are being offered to schools in Chandigarh, Panchkula, Mohali and nearby areas.

Don't you think that Pakistan, in their attempt to prove to the world that playing cricket in Pakistan is safe and with the threat level over there at skyrocketing levels, could have done something similar? Five advance policemen? That's security?

[EnterTheVoid]

At this stage, its worthwhile looking back at some of the early media descriptions of the Lahore attack to see how fabricated most of the nonsense appearing in Pak media really is. Most of the responses above claim that the attack was well planned / co - ordinated / executed. If you haven't seen the link I posted in the sticky thread, here it is again: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=157_1236129241 Now, having a look at this, can you seriously stand by your comments about the supposedly well planned nature of the attack ? What I see are a bunch of trigger happy vermin checking over the shoulders, casually waltzing over to the roundabout and start shooting randomly with a pose that would have Rambo blush. This was all done in broad daylight right near the stadium. Where are the supposed security guards? Didn't any one bother to call the police? As quickly as they came, they vanished into thin air without a trace Seriously, if this is how you describe a well co ordinated attack, than it speak volumes of the incompetence of the donkeys in charge of the government and defense related matters. The notereity of the ISI is a complete farce Now, any further developments regarding the "Indian Link" by their shoddy media would have no credibility whatsoever. ************************************************************************************************** Have a read of the following just to see what kind of security they offered: Cricket – the requiem Wednesday, March 04, 2009 One thing of which we may be certain is that whoever attacked the convoy of the Sri Lankan cricket team yesterday in Lahore – they did not arrive by boat. As this editorial is written we know very little else with certainty. We know for certain that there are eight dead, none of them Sri Lankan. But how many attackers? Ten? Twelve? Fourteen? And how do we 'know' these numbers anyway…did the gunmen form an orderly line and number-off military-style from left to right? Were any of them killed or wounded in the firefight which lasted thirty minutes according to one source and twenty minutes according to another? The unknowns multiply like rabbits. We can, however, make some informed assumptions. This was a carefully planned and executed attack carried out by people who knew what they were doing, and who appear to have been well armed if the five bags of weapons now found did actually belong to them. (Well planned, my foot!) They were able to effect an escape. Some of them wore what appeared to be track suits and trainers, and at least one of them wore a shalwar-kameez. Some of them wore backpacks. At least one had a full beard. They attacked the police protecting the convoy from both sides. The police did what they could to protect the convoy and quite possibly saved lives while giving their own. The driver of the Sri Lanka team bus drove straight to the stadium as fast as he could. The director of outside-broadcasting for Channel Ten Sports stated categorically within an hour of the attack that he did not regard it as a lapse of security – which in his opinion was "very tight" on this tour, with the Pakistanis taking every reasonable care. The hunt for the attackers goes on. At which point we enter the realms of fantasy. Within minutes a PPP politician was being interviewed on a private TV channel and saying that …"this is clearly the work of a foreign hand" (a verbatim quote). The internet was quickly alight with allegations that this was an Indian operation, or a Tamil Tiger operation and whatever it was it could not possibly have been carried out by Pakistanis or Muslims because Muslims are peace-loving people. The culture of instinctive denial clicked into gear immediately, fingers were as quickly pointed and assumptions, none of them backed by a shred of empirical evidence, were made. The reality is that this is just as likely to be an attack made by our own home-grown terrorist organizations as it is to have been made or facilitated by 'foreign hands'. There is no shortage of highly-competent well-armed and trained groups within our own borders capable of such an operation. They have no need of foreign assistance or foreign money – there are plenty of people here happy to finance them and offer logistical support. No shortage either of groups wishing to undermine the government and capable of exploiting a perceived weakness caused by the confusion rife in the Punjab police force; a product of the political movement of senior officers in the wake of the imposition of governor rule. Another reality is that the attack was carried out close to a police station and that the attackers must have conducted a reconnaissance for them to set up a kill-zone – and nobody noticed? Nobody noticed that up to fourteen heavily armed men using at least three cars, as well as rickshaws and bicycles, were securing a road junction in the centre of Lahore? A reasonable person may infer from this that there was a failure of intelligence, both electronic and human. The dead will be buried and mourned, there will be an official enquiry of which we will see little or nothing, there may or may not be arrests and the blame-game will go on until the next incident when the whole process begins all over again. Meanwhile, the prospect of us hosting international sporting events in future vanishes. Those who carped at the Australian refusal to tour here because of security concerns now have their comeuppance. Nobody is going to tour here for a very long time, be they cricketers, hockey players or players of tiddlywinks. Who will make inwards foreign investment into our businesses? Or run the relief agencies that support the refugees from our own internal warfare? Or provide training and support to our educationalists? The world has once again seen that Pakistan is an unsafe place, no matter where you are or who you are. That terrorism has both home and succour here. That the writ of our state is threadbare. On Tuesday March 3, 2009 we heard the requiem for international cricket in Pakistan, but we also heard the steady footfall of extremist forces as they march ever-nearer to power. http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=165515 *******************************************************************************************************

[cochise]

Some sense beginning to Dawn on the Pak intelligentsia: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Wheres-the-proof-of-Indian-hand-in-attack-Pak-media/articleshow/4229200.cms

Where's the evidence of Indian hand in attack: Pak media 5 Mar 2009, 1727 hrs IST, IANS The "flurry of charges" linking India to the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore "make no sense at all", an editorial in a leading English daily said on Thursday, while another cautioned that such finger pointing would only widen the India, Pakistan rift. "The flurry of charges from the media and members of the government that our neighbours to the east may have had a hand make no sense at all — given that the gunmen have not been apprehended and no other evidence points in this particular direction," The News said in an editorial headlined "No closer to the truth". On its part, Daily Times referred to the "planting" of a police report that apparently warned that India's spy agency RAW was planning to target the Sri Lankan cricketers and said it was meant to "widen the rift between India and Pakistan and bring relief to the terrorist elements under pressure from the Pakistan army in the tribal areas". The editorial was headlined "Reaching out for denial again". Pointing to the need "to put passion aside and accept the reality", The News said: "There is now no doubt at all that Pakistan is unsafe; no sporting team should be asked to visit it, unless we wish for blood on our hands." "The priority must be to assess how order can be restored in our state and the violent forces that operate within it eradicated. "Turning our attention to this would be a far more useful exercise than pointing fingers towards neighbours or pretending that the Pakistan is not a terrorist haven. The events of March 3 prove that it is and will remain so till we act decisively to restore the rule of law within it," the editorial maintained. The News also noted that the government had "done little" to "clear the mist of confusion or calm the deep unease" the audacious attack had created. "Indeed, the interior adviser's media talk in Islamabad seemed to add to the suspicions that no one at all with an iota of good sense is in charge of the country," the editorial added. The reference was to Interior Minister Rehman Malik's statement hours after the Lahore attack pointing to a "foreign hand" in the outrage. He, however, did not specifically name any country. Urging "logic and rationality" in dealing with the aftermath of the incident, the editorial said: "We all know that groups capable of carrying out the well-planned and expertly executed attack we saw on Tuesday exist within the country. "It is useless to turn a blind eye to the presence of forces such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) which have the capacity to stage such acts of terrorism. They of course also have reason to try and extract revenge for the crackdown against the group carried out over the past few weeks, in the aftermath of what happened at Mumbai," The News added. Noting there was "no doubt" about the fact that the security provided to the Sri Lankan team was seriously lacking, Daily Times said: "But to unite in dumping the entire incident on India may be proved wrong in the near future and may not be a durable prop on which to lean. "This is what happened after the Mumbai attacks when Islamabad was compelled to own that Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani and the incident was partly planned inside Pakistan," it added.

[EnterTheVoid]

On a side note, that f * rascal of a cricket chief is now blaming Chris Broad, a man who nearly lost his life, of lying :mad:

[cochise]

http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/broads-claims-a-big-lie-says-pakistan-20090305-8q5x.html

Broad's claims 'a big lie,' says Pakistan Shahid Hashmi March 5, 2009 - 11:39PM Pakistan cricket chief Ijaz Butt Thursday accused match official Chris Broad of lying about poor security during the terrorist attack on Sri Lanka's cricket squad. Match referee Broad told reporters that television footage of the attack showed "not a sign of a policeman anywhere," leaving him and fellow officials "sitting ducks" when armed men began shooting and throwing grenades at them on Tuesday. However, Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chief Butt Thursday hit back. "That a gentleman of his stature is saying this is unfortunate," he told a news conference. Butt said the PCB would be complaining to the game's governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), about Broad, who was in Lahore for the ill-fated second Test between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. "It is a big lie that there were no policeman. We will lodge a protest with the ICC," said Butt. Broad was travelling in a van behind the Sri Lanka team bus when both vehicles came under fire as they headed towards the Gaddafi stadium for what should have been the third day of the second Test. The 51-year-old former England batsman escaped unhurt, as did Australian on-field umpires Simon Taufel and Steve Davis, but six policemen and two civilians were killed and Pakistani fourth umpire Ahsan Raza was wounded. Seven Sri Lankan players and their assistant coach were also hurt. Broad, addressing a news conference in Britain on Wednesday, slammed Pakistani security forces for apparently abandoning the two vehicles. "We were promised high-level security and in our hour of need that security vanished." Butt disputed Broad's account, saying: "A commando jumped over Broad and saved his life. The commando was hurt so if there was no policeman, how come Broad was saved?" Broad also questioned why the Pakistan team did not leave their hotel at the same time as the Sri Lankan team and the officials. "I thought maybe they were having five or 10 minutes more in the hotel and would turn up later, but after this happened you start to think: 'Did someone know something and they held the Pakistan bus back?'" However, Butt rejected any notion of a conspiracy. "It is wrong to suggest that. The same security procedure was followed. The Pakistan team used to leave at the same time as the Sri Lankan team and other officials, but somehow or the other on that day they got a bit late," he said. "I hope the blame games stop. I don't want to use bad language but when Broad came for the one-day series (in January) he himself sent back the security officials and we told the ICC this," said the PCB chairman. "Two security agencies are preparing a report on what happened. If they come up with some blame then we will take responsibility." Butt said he hoped security measures would be stepped up for visitors in the future. "We hope next time bullet proof buses are provided to the teams and to make security better, teams must not follow the same travel routine, but come and go to the ground from different routes."

The Pakis have become shameless. Good...let them carry on accusing others...they are just discrediting themselves and making themselves a laughing stock...

[Sachinism]

^^ very true what reason does Broad have to lie

[DomainK]

^^ very true what reason does Broad have to lie

Dont you know that the entire world is conspiring against Pakistan? Any Pakistani who does not agree with that has sold his imaan to Indian money.

[cochise]

^^ very true what reason does Broad have to lie

And the fact that his testimony is corroborated by Taufel and Davis and Muralitharan...Mr Butt just turned himself into an ar*se...

[Rajan]

Butt is correct-Broad was certainly lying and he himself had admitted that he was lying down on the floor of the van, fearing for his life. Butt never tells lies.He promised Presidential level of security and delivered it. yes, they want their President Zardari to be assasinated and would only provide that much security to him. in future teams shud ask- Chennai & Mohali level scurities for them, rather than Pakistan Presidential (in)security!

[cochise]

Well, if you ask me...for teams to tour Pakistan again...you have to arm the cricketers and umpires...give them machine-guns, rocket-launchers, bazookas, grenades, mortars...the works...the team bus should be a tank...at least then, they can defend themselves...no need to rely on Pak police., who are wont to do the "disappearing act" when needed most.

[Fontaine]

What a clown this guy Butt is. Only hours after ICC officials are being shot at he questions their account of what happened? http://content.cricinfo.com/pakvsl/content/current/story/393513.html Here are a few notable gems from his nonsense: Butt accuses Broad of lies on security "All his [broad's] statements are false. He has now made obnoxious comments. That a gentleman of his stature is saying this is unfortunate," he told reporters in Lahore. The PCB, he said, would lodge a formal protest with the ICC against Broad, who was the ICC's match referee for the Test between Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the city. Dominic Cork, who was in Lahore working for the media at the time of the attack, reacted angrily to Butt's comments. "When they were getting the teams out of there I witnessed Butt sitting down and doing absolutely nothing."

[cochise]

Oh yeah...and the almost forgotten footage of the gunmen shooting at the van in which the umpires were in with gay abandon with no policemen in sight...how did Butt boy miss that? Now, is he going to say that the footage was computer generated by Chris Broad's son Stuart in the West Indies? Or were the Pak police like Klingons and they drew their cloak and became invisible so as to close in on the attackers that eventually got bored of drilling holes in the van and sauntered away?

[Fontaine]

I think I understand the problem now: Ijaz "The Butt" Jabba "The Hutt"

[cochise]

Jabba is better looking and smarter.

[cochise]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7920272.stm Footage from 00.09 to 00.23 shows gunmen shooting at Broads van...where da Police Butt?

[Gambit]

A hilarious passage in Butt's conference was when Butt was rambling on about Broad being pissed because of the Oval test result etc and then a female journo asked him - 'Lekin unki van pe to firing ho rahi thi'. Butt - 'Lekin bachaya kisne?' (wanted her to say police) Journo - 'Allah ne' Butt - (Slightly taken aback) ' Haan allah sabko bachata hai lekin....' :hysterical:

[beetle]

A hilarious passage in Butt's conference was when Butt was rambling on about Broad being pissed because of the Oval test result etc and then a female journo asked him - 'Lekin unki van pe to firing ho rahi thi'. Butt - 'Lekin bachaya kisne?' (wanted her to say police) Journo - 'Allah ne' Butt - (Slightly taken aback) ' Haan allah sabko bachata hai lekin....' :hysterical:

:hysterical::hysterical::hysterical:even I saw this and :hysterical:

[Ram]

This is brilliant. Not only has Pakistan scared away the rest of the world by allowing terrorists to have target practice in the city center, there are also making sure none of them ever come back again by allowing stupid idiots like Butt make disparaging comments about the same people who were magnanimous enough to tour their country in the first place. Maybe in a terror-infected nation like Pakistan, its Business-as-Usual for people to get fired at and escape with the odd shrapnel wound, but in other civilized nations, its is actually quite a big deal if you’re stuck in a mini-van in a roundabout and two terrorists casually position themselves behind you and start firing with their Kalashnikovs or start hurling hand grenades. :cantstop:

[Sachinism]

Butt is correct-Broad was certainly lying and he himself had admitted that he was lying down on the floor of the van, fearing for his life. Butt never tells lies.He promised Presidential level of security and delivered it. yes, they want their President Zardari to be assasinated and would only provide that much security to him. in future teams shud ask- Chennai & Mohali level scurities for them, rather than Pakistan Presidential (in)security!

in future??