KARACHI, Pakistan: At least 18 Pakistanis, including 12 children, were killed in a bus fire as they journeyed home after fleeing catastrophic monsoon flooding, officials and rescue workers said Thursday (Oct 13).

Pakistan has been hit by unprecedented monsoon rains this year, putting a third of the nation underwater, displacing 8 million people, and causing US$28 billion worth of devastation.

As the waters slowly recede, thousands of the displaced – many living in ramshackle tent cities – are travelling back to their sodden homes to remake their lives.

Police said the passengers died when flames broke out overnight on a northbound bus outside the city of Karachi, where they settled after fleeing one of the worst flood-hit areas.

“They were going back to their village when they were overtaken by this accident,” Vinod Kumar, a district health official present at the scene, told AFP.

“Apparently, the fire broke out in the air conditioning system of the bus but investigations will reveal the real cause,” said police officer Hashim Brohi, who was also present.

Pakistan has a dismal record of fatal traffic accidents due to badly maintained vehicles, poor roads, reckless driving and poorly trained emergency services.

The historic floods across the nation – which have killed 1,700 – have been linked to climate change.

For many students, the floods have disrupted their education.

At a makeshift school set up under tarp sheets near Malook Khaskheli, schoolteachers said that about half of the batch of 63 students aged five to 12 are still attending classes, while the rest had moved away.

University student Wasseem Ali Khan, 21, was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in medical sciences at Makhdoom Mohammad Zaman Talib ul Moula Government Boys Degree College, New Saeedabad.

Two months ago, the college building was converted into temporary housing. Mr Ali Khan has not been able to attend classes since then. He is among 400 people from his village now sheltering on campus.

WOMEN’S HEALTH

Besides students’ education, the floods in Pakistan have also severely disrupted access to healthcare.

This is compounded by the spread of malaria and waterborne illnesses in the wake of the disaster, with the United Nations warning of a “second wave of death and destruction”.

On Wednesday, the Mercy Relief team visited a roving clinic serving about 80 women from three villages in Tando Allahyar district.

This is part of a medical camp for ante- and post-natal care organised by NRSP, which provides free consultations and medicine to pregnant women and new mothers.

The clinic will move on to serve different flood-affected villages over the coming days.

Gynaecologist Dr Maira Yaqoob, 27, said that most patients she sees are showing signs of pain, fever and weakness. Some also had symptoms of waterborne illnesses such as diarrhoea and skin infection.

The Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), waged a years-long insurgency there that ended with a major military crackdown in 2014.

But there has been a resurgence in unrest since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Kabul last year.

The TTP has claimed dozens of attacks in recent weeks, mostly against security forces and anti-Taliban elders.

“We are tired and can no longer carry dead bodies,” said Muhammad Ali Shah, the former mayor of Swat.

“It is the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens and provide them with security, but the government’s silence on all these incidents is criminal.”

More than 5,000 people blocked a main road through Mingora, sparked by the latest attack on a school bus on Monday, in which the driver was killed and a 10 or 11-year-old boy wounded.

The TTP have denied responsibility and the police said they are investigating the motive.

Students and teachers walked out of schools – including the school attended by Yousafzai that her father established – to call for peace.

“Our protest will continue until the arrest of the killers, we will not rise from here until the top government officials assure us of justice and an end to militancy,” said doctor Amjad Ali, 36.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is out of money to spend on recovery from recent devastating floods, its climate change minister said on Tuesday (Oct 4), urging prompt international help at the UN launch of an aid appeal as the funds the country needs were ramped up five-fold.

The United Nations revised up its humanitarian aid appeal for Pakistan five-fold to US$816 million from US$160 million, as a surge of water-borne diseases and fear of growing hunger pose new dangers after weeks of unprecedented flooding linked to climate warming.

“We have no space to give our economy any stimulus,” the climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, told the conference in Geneva aimed at seeking aid for Pakistan.

She urged the developed world to accelerate funding for the ongoing domestic climate-linked disaster, which she said had no parallel in known history.

Over seven million people have been displaced from their homes, she said.

Pakistan’s economic affairs minister Ayaz Sadiq told the gathering that it would take “years and years” for the country to rebuild and help rehabilitate millions of people whose homes were destroyed by the flooding.

The floods, caused by abnormal monsoon rains and glacial melt, have submerged huge swathes of the South Asian country and killed nearly 1,700 people, most of them women and children.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced people who are living in the open are being exposed to diseases like malaria, diarrhoea, dengue fever, severe skin and eyes infections, all of which are fast spreading amid stagnant floodwaters that officials say will take several months to recede.

GENEVA: The United Nations has revised up its humanitarian appeal for Pakistan five-fold to US$816 million from US$160 million as it seeks to control a surge in water-borne diseases following the country’s worst floods in decades, an official said on Monday (Oct 3).

Nearly 1,700 people have been killed in floods caused by heavy monsoon rains and melting glaciers in a crisis that the government and the UN have blamed on climate change.

“We are now entering a second wave of death and destruction” Julien Harneis, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Pakistan said at a Geneva briefing.

“There will be an increase in child morbidity and it will be pretty terrible unless we act rapidly to support the government in increasing the provision of health, nutrition and water and sanitation services across the affected areas,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who fled their homes are living in government camps set up to accommodate them, or simply out in the open.

Stagnant floodwaters, spread over hundreds of square kilometres (miles), may take two to six months to recede in some places, and have already led to widespread cases of skin and eye infections, diarrhoea, malaria, typhoid and dengue fever.

The crisis hits Pakistan at a particularly bad time. With its economy in crisis, propped up by loans from the International Monetary Fund, it does not have the resources to cope with the longer-term effects of the flooding.

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani court on Monday (Oct 3) accepted an apology tendered by former prime minister Imran Khan and dropped a contempt of court case against him, his defence lawyer said, a ruling that ease the threat to him of disqualification from politics.

The Islamabad High Court had deferred Khan’s indictment over the contempt case after he apologised to the court in person late last month.

A convicted politician is liable to be disqualified from contesting elections and holding a public office for at least five years under Pakistani law.

“Imran Khan extended his apology in honour and respect for the judiciary, and the court today reciprocated by discharging the case against him,” defence lawyer Faisal Chaudhry told Reuters.

The charges were related to a speech by Khan in which he was accused of threatening police and judicial officers after one of his close aides was denied bail in a sedition case.

Khan and his legal team subsequently maintained that his remarks did not amount to a threat.

The cricket star-turned-politician has faced a spate of legal woes since his ouster in a confidence vote in April by a united opposition led by his successor, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Khan has been leading rallies since his dismissal demanding snap elections, which the ruling coalition has rejected, saying voting will be held as scheduled later next year.

“SECOND DISASTER”

According to the health department of Sindh province, the worst-affected region, 17,285 cases of malaria have been confirmed since Jul 1.

Anticipating the risk of disease outbreaks after the rescue and relief phase of the floods, the Sindh government is trying to hire more than 5,000 health professionals on a temporary basis in districts most at risk.

“We are short of human resources considering the magnitude of the burden of disease following the unprecedented rains and floods,” Qasim Soomro, provincial lawmaker and parliamentary health secretary of the Sindh government, told Reuters.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised concern about an impending “second disaster” of water-borne diseases spreading across the country, particularly in Sindh.

In the hospital ward in Sehwan, a young man with a high fever was having fits on a bed outside the main emergency room. His mother ran to Ahmed, who attended to the patient and asked a male nurse to place cold pads on his forehead.

The air was heavy with humidity, and there were not enough air conditioners to cool temperatures in overcrowded corridors lined with beds. The wards were filled to capacity and a handful of beds had more than one patient on them.

Ahmed, a graduate of a university in China, described the pressure he and other medics were under.

“With such influx, we … cannot wait for test results for each patient to start the treatment,” he said, adding he begins administering medicine for malaria as soon as he sees some symptoms.

The institute in Sehwan serves people from neighbouring towns and districts, including those living in camps while the waters recede and rebuilding can begin.

Jagan Shahani’s daughter fell unconscious after getting a fever around a week ago. He used a boat to get out of his flooded village of Bhajara and flagged down a car on the nearby road that took them to Sehwan.

“Doctors said she had malaria,” he said late last week. “This is our fourth night here. There is nothing here to eat but Allah has been very kind to provide everything,” added Shahani, whose 15-year-old daughter Hameeda is now recovering.

On the outskirts of town, hundreds of displaced people queued up for rations being distributed at Lal Bagah, a tent settlement where displaced families prepared tea and breakfast on open fires.

The Indus Highway that runs past Sehwan is dotted with tent camps for displaced people.

Some are beginning to return home where waters have retreated far enough, but not all are so lucky.

“There is no one here to help me but Allah. I pray to Allah that the waters recede in my village and I can return to my home,” said Madad Ali Bozdar.

Bozdar, 52, is from Bubak, a town located on the northeastern bank of Manchar Lake. Speaking on Friday, he said his village was still under 3m to 4m of water. He expected to be able to go back in around two months’ time.

The rollover is related to the Paris club agreement in April 2020 to support 73 lower income countries during COVID-19, under which the US provided relief on US$128 million in debt to Pakistan.

The agreement to suspend payments on that debt, plus an additional US$4 million, has now been rolled over again.

Pakistan’s outgoing finance minister Miftah Ismail said last week that Islamabad was seeking debt relief from bilateral creditors in the wake of flooding, but emphasised the government was not seeking any relief from commercial banks or Eurobond creditors.

The country’s bonds had slumped to just half their face value, after the Financial Times newspaper said a United Nations development agency was urging the cash-strapped country to restructure its debt.

Ismail said the US$1 billion bond would be paid on time and in full due later this year.

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani court on Thursday (Sep 29) quashed the conviction of Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, in a corruption case that had seen her sentenced to seven years in jail, her party and defence lawyer said, lifting curbs on her contesting elections.

Maryam Nawaz is seen as the most influential politician in the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) party that has her uncle Shehbaz Sharif leading a coalition government at present.

Her father has presented her as his heir in politics.

A two-judge panel found there was no evidence to prove the prosecution case that Maryam Nawaz abetted any corruption in buying high-end apartments in London, the lawyer Amjad Pervaiz said.

She was convicted by an anti-graft court in 2018 along with her father who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for not being able to disclose a known source of income for buying the properties.

The prosecution had charged Maryam Nawaz with abetment for concealing information about the properties owned by her father.

She was on bail, and had appealed in the Islamabad High Court to overturn the conviction, which she and her party said was political victimization.

Under Pakistani law, a convicted politician is disqualified from contesting elections for five years.

“The lies have a shelf life, it could be some years, but it had to end, like it did today,” Maryam Nawaz told reporters after the ruling. “I humbly thank God,” she said.

Her father was thrown out of government in 2017 after he ran into serious differences with the powerful military, which, according to political analysts, mostly decides who will rule the 220 million strong South Asian nation.

The corruption cases had stemmed out of the Panama Papers document leak that listed the Avenfield properties in London owned by Sharif’s family.

Sharif blamed his ousting on fabricated cases in the courts backed by the military.

The military denies these allegations.

KARACHI: A gunman posing as a dental patient shot and killed a dual national Chinese-Pakistani man working in a dental clinic in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on Wednesday (Sep 28) before fleeing the scene, police said.

A Chinese couple running the clinic was wounded in the attack, which took place in the city’s Sadar neighbourhood, said police official Asad Raza. Police identified the victim as Ronald Raymond Chou and the couple as Dr Richard Hu and Margaret Hu.

He said the couple was in stable condition at a hospital.

Sharjeel Memon Kharal, the deputy inspector-general of police in Karachi, said it was a targeted killing. “So far as per the initial investigation, this (dental) clinic was singled out and targeted.”

He said a lone gunman was involved in the attack and that officers were investigating.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the killing, but the separatist Baluch Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for some of the previous attacks on Chinese people in the city and elsewhere in Pakistan.

Thousands of Chinese people live and work in Pakistan, with most of them involved in Beijing’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure project connecting south and central Asia with the Chinese capital.

A key road linking Pakistan’s southern port of Gwadar, in southwestern Baluchistan province, with China’s northwest Xinjiang province, is part of what is known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

The BLA opposes Chinese investment in the province as it believes Beijing is exploiting the area’s resources without giving locals anything.

In April, an explosion ripped through a van inside a Karachi university campus, killing three Chinese nationals and their Pakistani driver. This attack was claimed by the BLA, which said a female suicide bomber had targeted the Chinese and warned of more such attacks.

China condemned this attack and asked Pakistan to enhance security for its nationals.

In a statement, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah condemned Wednesday’s shooting, saying “such incidents are intolerable.” He ordered police to ensure the arrest of the attacker as soon as possible.

Baluchistan has long been the scene of a low-level insurgency by armed groups demanding more autonomy and a greater share of the region’s natural resources if not outright independence from Pakistan.

In some cases, the Pakistani Taliban have also targeted the Chinese.