A friend from Lahore messaged me, asking about the social media reports claiming that 219 people were killed by forces in your city. I responded, saying that Latif Khosa mentioned 278 deaths on Hamid Mir’s show, while Sheikh Waqas Akram told Kashif Abbasi it was 100.
This is really a tragic moment, and even if one person loses their life, their family will never recover from this grief. The operation should be condemned because people have the right to protest peacefully.
However, various claims are being made about how many people actually died. The government is stating 10 to 12 deaths, while Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) insists the number is no less than 200-300.
I said, the grief of the deceased is one thing, but there is a matter of common sense. Just think: if we accept the figures, imagine 219 bodies lying on Jinnah Avenue in Islamabad within an hour. The city would have erupted. In a city like Islamabad, such an event would have been catastrophic. Everyone has mobile phones—yet not a single video or footage was taken of two or three hundred bodies lying on the street with people walking by, and not even one person recording it?
Even the most powerful and ruthless government can’t kill 200-300 people in an hour, collect their bodies, and make them disappear. Furthermore, it’s impossible to kill that many people in such a short time.
As soon as Bushra and Ghulam Sarwar Khan fled, leaving their workers defenseless and at the mercy of the police, within an hour, Mohsin Naqvi and Atta Tarar were giving a press briefing in the same D-Chowk, where, according to PTI, 200-300 people were killed. Media personnel were present, the D-Chowk had been reopened, and traffic was flowing.
If there were bodies on Jinnah Avenue and D-Chowk, it would have taken the whole night to clear them. The government would not have immediately reopened D-Chowk and cleared the roads so quickly.
So, according to this theory, the government managed to kill 200-300 people in an hour, disperse thousands of people, dispose of all the bodies, wash the blood off the street as if it were the case with Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, and not let the media find out anything? And all of this happened while the media was in the area and crucial ministers were talking to reporters?
Not one of the thousands of journalists, YouTubers, or media persons, all of whom are equipped with phones, noticed 200-300 bodies vanishing within an hour? The bodies and the blood should have been visible, with footage circulating. Yet there is not a single video or photo of these bodies being disposed of.
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How many workers, security personnels, or CDA staff must have been involved in the clean-up? Not a single conscience among them was awakened by such a large-scale massacre that anyone would come forward and share the horrifying story of this cruelty?
You have to understand the amount of manpower, logistics, and time required to clean up 200-300 bodies and wash away the blood. There should have been pools of blood on Blue Area’s streets, but no one captured any footage of it. Instead, the only thing circulating are fake photoshopped images from social media.
Even 24-36 hours later, only a few relatives of the deceased have appeared. Where are the families of these 200-300 people who were supposedly killed? Why haven’t they come forward to share their grief with us?
In a small city like Islamabad, it’s simply impossible to kill 200-300 people, clean up the streets, dispose of the bodies, and make everything look normal in an hour. Our governments and institutions may be cruel, ruthless, and incompetent, but they aren’t capable enough to pull off such a large-scale cover-up. If they were, we would have been a superpower by now.
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If we accept PTI’s figure of 200-300 people being killed by firing, then with the thousands of workers present, the number of injured should be at least 5,000. If the government managed to make the bodies disappear, those injured should be brought forward to show the scale of the cruelty, and the nation should unite to protest against such a horrific crime.
When you give false figures, you give the government the opportunity to dismiss the claims as lies. I’ve learned one thing in journalism: if even 1percent of the facts are not accurate,your political opponents will use it to discredit 99% of your truth.
By giving false figures, you’re actually doing a disservice to the innocent workers who died. You’re ignoring the real victims, the ones whose bodies are supposedly missing, and whose deaths are being forgotten in this entire narrative.
You’re making it easier for the government to avoid accountability and erasing the memory of the real martyrs.
Written By: Rauf Klasra
