Ten years ago, a bus carrying the Sri Lanka team to a Test against Pakistan in Lahore was ambushed by terrorists. The horrifying ordeal was recreated in the 2010 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack by Scyld Berry and Nagraj Gollapudi.
Mahela Jayawardene, Sri Lanka’s captain, was finding it difficult to reach his wife on her mobile phone. Already on that Tuesday morning he had tried her twice, but on both occasions the call went straight to voicemail. It was his ritual on tour to call Christina as soon as he boarded the team bus, and it was no different after he had walked out of the Pearl Continental hotel in Lahore and joined the rest of the Sri Lankan cricketers waiting to go to the Gaddafi Stadium.
At about 8.20am, the convoy – comprising a white minivan for the ICC match officials, security vehicles, policemen on motorbikes, a fire engine and an ambulance, as well as the Sri Lankans’ team bus, although not the Pakistanis’ – turned left out of the hotel, did a U-turn, then drove alongside a canal in the residential district of Gulbarg.
“All the roads were supposedly blocked off,” Chris Broad, the match referee who was travelling in the minivan, remembers. “But we saw the occasional tuk-tuk and motorbike on the roads, so they weren’t really clear.”
A television in the dressing-room was replaying footage of the shooting, which allowed the Sri Lankans to view their miraculous escape. But they were alarmed at the media reporting their whereabouts. “When the media was reporting that the players were safe inside the ground, the players were shocked, as that would help the terrorists to rush to the ground,” Jayawardene says.
The Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapakse, called Jayawardene, telling him that he was sending a charter plane straight from Colombo. Hotel staff at the Pearl Continental were told to pack the players’ bags, and after a few hours the party were airlifted by helicopter from the ground to Lahore airport. As captain, Jayawardene did not want to leave Samaraweera and Paranavitana behind. Only when the doctors in Lahore gave the pair an all-clear did the team board the flight.
Sri Lanka were not supposed to be in Pakistan in 2009. Originally, India were scheduled to tour Pakistan for a Test series, but they had pulled out in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai which had been spread over the last dreadful days of November 2008. So the Sri Lankan board had agreed to fill the breach. Their players, obviously, had some apprehensions.
“After the Indians pulled out, and the Australians too refused to tour Pakistan, we were a bit concerned when our administrators accepted the tour,” Jayawardene says. “So we actually questioned the board about the security conditions. They assured us that the Pakistan government had promised us VVIP security, so with those assurances we went ahead with the tour.”
Everyone felt there was a stark difference in security when the action shifted after the Karachi Test to Lahore. “We went to the ODIs and were comfortable with the security around us in both Karachi and Lahore,” Jayawardene says. “But when we went back for the Test series we felt the security wasn’t what it had been during the ODI in Lahore. We questioned that, but people in the know-how and the authorities explained it was fine. We accepted their word at face value because we were no security experts.”
In fact, a move by Pakistan’s Supreme Court had created a power vacuum in Punjab and the provincial capital Lahore. The national opposition leader Nawaz Sharif had been barred from elected office, and his brother Shahbaz, head of the Punjab government, was also ousted. Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari took charge of the province and immediately made changes to key posts in the police and security departments. Nawaz Sharif held Zardari’s move to topple his brother opened up the possibility for the attack.
The intensity of this attack by terrorists – whose identity, to date, remains unproven – can be gauged from what they left behind: a large weapons cache including anti-personnel mines and two unexploded car bombs, a total of eight people killed, and about 20 injured, including eight members of the Sri Lankan touring party.
One of the dead was a traffic policeman, Tanvir Iqbal, who had specifically asked to be on duty at the roundabout so he could see the cricketers. “All the talk that no one would target cricketers seems so hollow now. Far from being untouchable, we are now prize targets for extremists. That’s an uncomfortable reality we have to come to terms with,” adds Sangakkara, now Sri Lanka’s captain.
What still angers the players is that they could never see their 12 masked assailants, who had arrived from nowhere and launched this unprecedented attack on a cricket team. “Now you think about it you feel crazy,” Jayawardene reflects. “We couldn’t do anything about it, that was the sad part. There was no way for us to run, no way for us to hide, but stay on the floor. We couldn’t react. We couldn’t hit back at them. That was a desperate situation. We had no choices.” Sportsmen, normally, do not accept defeat lying down.
Wounds started to heal once the participants reached home. The Sri Lankan board appointed counsellors to help their players heal psychologically. The ICC also told the umpires and Broad to seek counselling, after they had been flown to Abu Dhabi that night and driven to the ICC’s headquarters in Dubai.
Pakistani doctors told Raza it would take him at least 18 months to recover, after 80 stitches were inserted on one side of his body and he lost the use of the lung that had been punctured by a bullet. Yet he returned to stand in a senior game two and a half months after being shot. Raza never allowed his willpower to desert him: once 20 pints of blood had been transfused into his body, he knew he would stand on his feet soon. But he can no longer sit in public places where people smoke, nor can he tolerate strong perfumes. He thanks Broad for risking his life and using his presence of mind to try and stop the flow of blood.
Broad met the Sri Lankans again in September 2009 in Colombo, where he was the match referee during a tri-series: “I chatted to one or two of their players, but didn’t go into it in too much detail. I was so pleased to see all of them – especially Samaraweera who was the most badly injured – back playing again,” he says.
During the Ahmedabad Test in India in late 2009, while travelling back to the team hotel, Samaraweera heard a firecracker flying past the team bus. He jumped out of his seat, and Sangakkara had to hold him tight. Samaraweera, who, in spite of his experiences, had a prolific year otherwise as the leading run-scorer in Test cricket, is now just happy to be alive. He has kept the bullet, which the doctors who operated on him in Colombo gave to his wife Erandathi, saying it was a lucky bullet as it had failed to reach the bone a few centimetres away.
“I think I will keep it all my life,” Samaraweera says with a big smile. “At the moment it is a terrible thing, but with time it may be something like a lucky thing which I can look at and think about in the future.”
Of the day when cricket lost its innocence, and his final Test as Sri Lanka’s captain, Jayawardene has a unique memory – or so it is to be hoped. “It was not the ideal one, but it was a great farewell for a captain. Once you go through all this, everything else becomes immaterial.”
