Stephen Brenkley, INDEPENDENT, NZ HERALD STAFF
AP, AGENCIES
A Pakistani minister has blamed India for the deadly terrorist attack which killed several police officers and a civilian, and wounded members of the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore today.
A dozen men attacked Sri Lanka's cricket team with rifles, grenades and rocket launchers ahead of a match, wounding seven players and a coach from Britain in a brazen assault on South Asia's beloved sport. An assistant coach was also wounded, but the players' and coach's injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
The Reuters news agency reports that Pakistani state shipping minister Sardar Nabil Ahmed Gabol has accused India of conspiring to defame Pakistan internationally. He is reported as saying that the gunmen responsible for the attack entered Pakistan across the Indian border.
The assailants ambushed the convoy carrying the squad and match officials at a traffic circle close to the main sports stadium in the eastern city of Lahore, triggering a 15-minute gunbattle with police guarding the vehicles.
None of the attackers were killed or captured at the scene, city police chief Haji Habibur Rehman said. Authorities did not speculate on the identities of the attackers or their motives.
The attack reinforced perceptions that nuclear-armed Pakistan is veering out of control and will end any hopes of international cricket teams - or any sports teams - playing in the country for months, if not years. Even before the incident, most cricket teams choose not to tour the country because of security concerns. The attack came three months after the Mumbai terror attacks, which were allegedly carried out by Pakistan militants.
Two Sri Lankan players - Thilan Samaraweera and Tharanga Paranavitana - were being treated for injuries in hospital but were astable, said Chamara Ranavira, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission. Team captain Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara, Ajantha Mendis, Suranka Lakmal and Chaminda Vaas had minor injuries, the Sri Lankan Cricket Board said. Ranavira said British assistant coach Paul Farbrace also sustained minor injuries. Australian head coach Trevor Bayliss was not wounded, Sri Lanka's Foreign Ministry said, refuting earlier reports he had minor wounds. Veteran batsman Sangakkara told Sri Lankan radio station Yes-FM that "all the players are completely out of danger."
Authorities cancelled the test match and the Lahore governor said the team was flying home. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa condemned the attack and ordered his foreign minister to immediately travel to Pakistan to help assist in the team's ensure they are safe.
TV footage of the attack showed gunmen with backpacks - apparently the attackers - firing at the convoy as they retreated from the scene, with several damaged vehicles and a lone, unexploded grenade lying on the ground. Other video showed the bodies of three people crumpled on the ground.
"It is a terrible incident and I am lost for words," said Steve Davis, an Australian who was umpiring the match. Nadeem Ghauri, a Pakistani umpire who witnessed the attack, said the umpires were behind a bus of Sri Lankan players when suddenly they heard gunshots. "The firing started at about 8:40 and it continued for 15 minutes," he said, adding "our driver was hit, and he was injured."
Lahore police chief Rehman said officers were hunting down the attackers who managed to flee. "Our police sacrificed their lives to protect the Sri Lankan team." Three hours after the attack, at least eight Sri Lankan players and team officials left the Gadaffi stadium in Lahore on a Pakistani army helicopter that took off from the pitch. It was not immediately clear where the chopper was heading. Haider Ashraf, a senior police official, said six policemen and a civilian died in the attack. It was unclear whether the civilian was a passer-by or someone traveling in the convoy.
Sri Lanka had agreed to this tour - allowing Pakistan to host its first test matches in 14 months - only after India and Australia postponed scheduled trips. Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said little could be done to stop such an attack.
"I think the Pakistani authorities have provided adequate security but as we know from experience ... there is never enough security to counter a well organized and determinedterrorist group."
The International Cricket Board quickly moved to condemn the attack. "We note with dismay and regret the events of this morning in Lahore and we condemn this attack without reservation," ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat said in a statement. "It is a source of great sadness that there have been a number of fatalities in this attack and it is also very upsetting for the wider cricket family that some of the Sri Lanka players and one match official have been injured in this attack."
Pakistan is battling a ferocious insurgency by Islamist militants with links to al-Qaida who have staged high-profile attacks on civilian targets before.
One militant group likely to fall under particular suspicion is Lashkar-e-Taiba, the network blamed for the Mumbai terror attacks. The group has been targeted by Pakistani authorities since then and its stronghold is in eastern Pakistan.
The nature of the attack - coordinated, using multiple gunmen armed with explosives - is reminiscent of the Mumbai strikes in November that raised tensions between Pakistan and India.
In the past, India and Pakistan have blamed each other for attacks on their territories. Any allegations like that will trigger fresh tensions between the countries, which are already dangerously high. The Indian government refused permission for the national cricket team to tour Pakistan last month.
Authorities will also consider possible links to Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger separatist rebels who are being badly hit in a military offensive at home, though Sri Lankan military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara says authorities there did not believe the group was responsible.
Sri Lanka appeared on the brink of crushing the Tamil Tiger rebels after more than a quarter century of civil war. In recent months, government forces have pushed the guerrillas out of much of the de facto state.
The Tamil Tigers, who are fighting for an independent state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, rarely launch attacks outside Sri Lanka, though their most prominent attack - the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female suicide bomber - took place at an election rally in India in 1991.
Most of the violence in Pakistan occurs in its northwest regions bordering Afghanistan, where Taleban and al-Qaida militants have established strongholds. Lahore has not been immune from militant violence, however.
Cricket changed forever yesterday. The attack on Sri Lanka's team in the centre of Lahore went far beyond Pakistan in particular and the Asian Subcontinent in general. Its thunderous effects could be felt everywhere the sport is played.
The game cannot and will not be played in Pakistan for the foreseeable future, a period that could last five years or 15 years. New Zealand this morning called off their tour there scheduled for December, but there are also serious doubts about playing the game in India and nothing said by officials with cash registers in their eyes could alter that.
The Indian Premier League, due to start next month with the world's best cricketers taking part, is under threat, partly because players may be unwilling to travel, partly because the Indian government went some way yesterday to conceding that it could not guarantee security. England's enlisted players were considering last night what to do. Those in the West Indies were still stunned by what had taken place.
Beyond that, the fate of the 2011 World Cup being planned in four countries of the Subcontinent - India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh - is at best uncertain. Although officials from the International Cricket Council hedged their bets, Pakistan will clearly not be a venue. But the feeling will persist, with memories still fresh of the terrorist atrocity in Mumbai last November, that safety cannot be guaranteed anywhere.
The World Twenty20 is scheduled to take place in England this summer and the security restrictions that will be necessary with 12 teams taking part will make it a logistical nightmare. The murderers of Lahore ensured that no game anywhere will be easy to arrange or comfortably attended.
In the Caribbean, England's cricketers about to leave Barbados for Trinidad, attempted to grasp the enormity of what had taken place. A few yards from the hotel they were about to leave in Bridgetown, gentle waters lapped a sun-kissed beach. It was a scene from paradise while they were hearing about a hell on earth.
Stuart Broad, the team's richly promising fast bowler, was simply relieved to hear that his father Chris was safe. As the match referee in the test series between Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Broad Senior had been travelling in a car behind the Sri Lankan team coach. His driver was killed but he was, it was reported, taken to safety unharmed with other officials by a nearby policeman as bullets rained around.
There remained a will to play cricket. As David Morgan, the Welsh president of the ICC, said: "The world is a dangerous place but cricket must go on, it will go on. It is a great game which is a solace to many people." But never again can the safety of cricketers anywhere cricket is played be taken for granted
If the audacious ambush, as the players made their way to the Gaddafi Stadium for a test match, sought attention it succeeded brilliantly. This has been a catastrophe waiting to happen. During a decade, perhaps more, of terrorist interventions in countries where cricket is played the official line has remained chillingly standard: that players have never been targets and never would be the targets.
But there was always the uncomfortable feeling that this would alter, that sooner or later somebody with weapons and a cause would realise what cricketers could do for it. The comparisons with the attack on the Israeli team by extremists at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 were made immediately. But then one particular team was deliberately targeted, in Lahore it was Sri Lanka but it could in truth have been any team. In the event no players or officials were killed yesterday but two civilians and six policeman.
Two of the Sri Lanka team were more badly injured than the others, the batsmen Thilan Samaraweera and Tharanga Paranavitana who were later released from hospital. The juxtaposition of sport and life was brought home by the involvement of Samaraweera. He had scored double centuries in both the first test match, in Karachi, and the second in Lahore, the third day of which was due to take place yesterday. That glittering achievement was put into perspective by the horror of the journey to the stadium.
There were narrow escapes by men who came for a game and saw bloodshed. Chris Broad was in a car behind the Sri Lankan team bus. His driver was shot dead as the bus carrying the players sped away while under fire.
Morgan and the ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat will come under immense pressure to announce that Pakistan will not be part of the World Cup plans. It was conceded at the press conference they gave in London that their security advice on Pakistan had changed. The fact was that the country was deemed by experts to be safer under the military government of Pervez Musharraf which had been in power for a decade until last year when it was replaced by a civilian administration.
There is bound to be a struggle within the ICC. There were already signs yesterday that Pakistan will not want to become a pariah but they will soon have to recognise that no other country will play there.
Morgan tried to dowse some of the flames by mentioning the terrorist attacks on London in 2005 which happened on the day England were playing Australia in a one-day international in Leeds.
But he and Lorgat had no option but to concede that the landscape has now changed irrevocably. As they spoke their shock at the turn of events was obvious. They had been dragged from the comfort zone they had occupied previously - a place established on the fact that hitherto there had been no direct attacks on cricketers.
The shock at what had happened was no better summed up than by Graeme Smith, the captain of South Africa, whose team had been beaten by Australia in the first test match of the series between the countries the previous day. "The word 'tragedy' is often used to describe a setback on a sporting field but this is a real tragedy," he said. "It is a tragedy for all the people of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, it is a tragedy for cricket and it is a tragedy for all decent people.
"There is a tremendous brotherhood between players around the world and at this moment the South African team extends its sympathy to all those who have been affected by this terrible event. We are hurting after our defeat yesterday but this puts into perspective what real suffering is. Our thoughts are with the players and we hope that they arrive home safely to their families."
The West Indies Cricket Board president, Julian Hunte, also articulated the global outrage. "All test-playing nations must ensure that security is priority number one, in our area of the world as well," he said. "Before, it was felt that cricketers were not being targeted regardless of what was going on in Pakistan. There was a level of comfort. This now blows that away and it means cricketers are being seen as targets. It is a matter we cannot ignore, and we must ensure the safety of players and everyone else involved in this beautiful game."
It was always likely that the IPL would be an unwelcome spectre. So it proved. Hardly had the Sri Lankan team been airlifted from the stadium than the IPL's commissioner, Lalit Modi said his competition would still be taking place. "The IPL will go ahead as planned and I don't visualise any impact on it," Modi said on NDTV. "There are a few dates which will change due to the general elections and a few of the games will be shifted around. But we will get under way on 10 April."
If this almost beggared belief considering what had happened, the Indian government saw matters differently. While Modi stipulated that several security measures had already been put in place following the Mumbai terrorist attacks, which caused England briefly to abandon their Indian tour late last year, and that they had envisaged every conceivable mode of attack, the government's home minister called for the IPL to be abandoned.
Any difficulties have been compounded by the calling of elections in India with polling coinciding with the IPL. The country's home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said: "I have requested the home secretary to get in touch with the IPL organisers and discuss rescheduling the dates. It will be difficult to provide adequate paramilitary forces for election purposes and for the IPL.
"I'm not worried about my ability to provide security. I can. But since it coincides with the elections, I don't want to be stretched and I don't want my forces to be strained."
In those circumstances it is impossible to imagine that even a competition as lucrative as the IPL could proceed as planned, or that England's recruited players will wish to take part. But with the IPL anything is possible.
The ICC will be under the closest scrutiny now. With Lorgat at the helm they will endeavour to act as a proper governing body.
That could be seen by his urging Pakistan to seek neutral venues to play matches, with England well to the fore as the venue. But as the dust settles slightly with the murderers still at large, Lorgat will see that it is not simply about Pakistan. It is about cricket everywhere.
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