Security officials inspect the historic house once used by Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, after a bomb attack in Ziarat, in Baluchistan province, yesterday.
QUETTA: Separatist militants blew up a historic building linked to Pakistan’s founding father in the country’s violence-plagued southwest after shooting dead a guard in a predawn attack yesterday, officials said.
The attackers, armed with automatic weapons entered the 19th century wooden Ziarat Residency after midnight and planted several bombs, senior administration official Nadeem Tahir said.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the driving force behind the creation of the Pakistan, spent his last days in the building, which was declared a national monument following his death, one year after the country’s independence in 1947.
The building is in Ziarat town, 80km southeast of Quetta, the capital of insurgency-hit Baluchistan province.
“They shot dead the guard who resisted the intruders,” Tahir said.
Police official Asghar Ali said militants planted several bombs and detonated them by remote control.
“The Ziarat Residency, which had its balcony, floor and front made of wood, has been totally gutted,” he said.
At least four blasts were heard in the town, he said. The building caught fire and it took five hours to bring the blaze under control as Ziarat, a small hill station, has no fire brigade.
A separatist-group later claimed responsibility for the attack. “We blew up the Ziarat Residency,” Meerak Baluch, a spokesman for the Baluchistan Liberation Army said in a phone call from undisclosed location. “We don’t recognise any Pakistani monument.”
No one has been arrested, officials said.
Prime Minister Sharif and several political leaders strongly condemned the attack while Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar promised arrest of the attackers.
Hundreds of people including, some party leaders and students staged a protest rally in the town demanding “exemplary punishment of culprits involved in the attack,” witnesses said.
Provincial Chief Secretary Babar Yaqoob told reporters that “people involved in the colossal destruction of our national monument will not be spared”.
“The government has ordered immediate steps to rebuild the Ziarat Residency in its original form,” he said.
“It was an undisputed structure, it had never received any threat in the past. Local people had special love for this site because it had been attracting local and foreign tourists,” he said.
Ziarat, located at more than 2,500 metres above sea level and surrounded by Juniper trees, is a popular tourist site.
The two-storey structure was built in 1892 and was formerly used by officials from the British colonial rule in India.
The furniture used by Jinnah and kept at its original place as national heritage since his death in September 1948, has also been destroyed, officials said.
AFP
