Five-year-old Omar’s body was riddled by over 20 bullets – how many can a pistol fire?
Only three days after Sardar Ahmad, a senior Afghan journalist, was callously murdered with his wife, Humaira, daughter, six-year-old Nelofar, and son, Omar, details about who exactly shot at the family while they were dinning at a luxury hotel in Kabul have twisted dreadfully.
Sardar’s family says Omar and Nelofar’s bodies were each chopped into piece by over 20 bullets.
“Bullets dropped off the children’s bodies over the coffin board,” Sardar’s bereaved mother told reporters on Saturday. (Listen to the mourning account here in Dari)
The assailants carried pistols
Four teenage assailants are seen in a security footage entering the Serena Hotel on the evening of the assault which resulted in 13 deaths, including all the assailants.
Taliban have said they sent the suicidal squad to the luxury hotel and caused the mayhem.
Afghan officials including a visiting delegation of U.S. Senators have blamed the assailants for killing Sardar Ahmad and his children.
The Taliban, however, said in a statement on Sunday their attackers did not target the children.
ISI
In a surprise move on Sunday, the Afghan President’s Office acquitted the Taliban and its Haqqani offshoot of perpetuating the Serena massacre.
“Intelligence from the National Directorate of Security indicates that Taliban and the Haqqani Network were unaware of this operation but all evidence and preliminary intelligence analysis point to a direct involvement of foreign intelligence in this terrorist attack,” said a statement from President Hamid Karzai Office.
Karzai’s statement also rebukes Shield, a private security firm which was in charge of Serena’s security.
Shield guards reacted swiftly after the first bullet was fired by the assailants, according to an Afghan security official. The guards were equipped with machine guns and managed to kill the four Taliban assailants under a storm of heavy firing.
No autopsy
The late Sardar Ahmad family was laid to ground on Sunday in Kabul. No post-mortem examination was conducted on their corpses to determine what had caused each death.
Afghanistan’s coroner office has the capacity to undertake autopsy operations and bodies of the four non-Afghans killed in the Serena Hotel attack were taken to the Afghan Coroner Office for autopsy, a physician working at the office said.
Technically it’s still possible to shed some scientific lights on the causes of the late Sardar family’s death by exhuming their bodies.
Sardar’s youngest son has survived despite critical gun wounds. Another way to substantiate the differing details could be to examine the surviving kid’s wounds to find out whether they were caused by pistol or gun shots.
Such an action would not return the joyful journalist and his innocent kids but would unearth fundamental facts about the tragedy.
