With London and the Underground bombings the flavour of the week, copycat catastrophes are clamouring for the same kind of attention.
Splicing the efforts of the recent blast past, events in Iran and Pakistan are looking to bask in some of the referential attention. Even if the execution is halved.
Riding along the rails, Pakistan netted eyeballs as they collected bodies and twisted metal with a spectacular derailment in the remote town of Ghotki. Cast against the recent British death toll as a benchmark, the three train calamity in Pakistan's south brought in a staggering 150 DOAs and injuring 1000 others. Hopeful police hint that even a climb up to 300 bodies is not out of the question.
Espying the other half of the London equation, Jalowla, located near the Iranian border, picked up the bomb. Spurred largely from an atmosphere of increasing tension between the Shiite and Sunni Muslims, a suicide bomber chose to plaster a organ inspired mural on a Sunni mosque. Despite the grand gesture, the bomber, with early indications of being caught prematurely by the trigger of the boom, could only manage to carve out two corpses. Sixteen others were merely wounded with six of those in a serious condition.
Even the next J.K. Rowling novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is reaping some of the glare. With trains and bombs already taken, it was the expected mince meat construction of security over the release of the next tome bringing in its rewards.
Written on Wednesday, 13 July 2005