Religion no bar for terror

There were tragic scenes at the public mortuary of the Osmania Hospital on Sunday morning as crying relatives searched frantically for missing kin. One mother held her dead son Vinay Babu, an employee at a book store near the Gokul Chat Bhandar, pleading with him to wake up. By late evening there was only one unidentified body with a severed head still lying at the morgue.

Middle-aged sisters Anuradha, Lakshmi and Meena were standing on the road divider waiting to get across to the Gokul Chat Bhandar after Raksha Bandhan shopping when the second of the two blasts occurred. Lakshmi is in an intensive care unit of a private hospital, shrapnel from the explosion hitting her upper body. Her sisters, with swollen heads and several tiny wounds inflicted by the small metal balls packed in the bomb, lie injured in a special ward.

“We had gone shopping for Rakhi and were trying to get across to the chat shop when there was a loud explosion. I don’t remember anything else. When I came around I was in a hospital,” said Anuradha.

“My son had gone to the chat shop with some friends when the explosion took place causing serious injuries to his stomach. An emergency surgery was performed as soon as he was brought to the hospital,” said Faizuddin Ansari, father of 17-year-old diploma student Rafiuddin Ansari.

Swapnil Gadekar, 20, who was part of a 45-member student group from the Amruthvahini Engineering College at Sangamner in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district lost seven of his batchmates in the first blast at the Lumbini Garden amphitheatre and is himself nursing a leg injury at another private hospital in Hyderabad.

“We heard a loud sound and looked around. We did not realise it was our own students who had been hit,” said a teacher.