Even before the volley of gunfire shattered the peace of the night, a sense of foreboding had gripped the sleepy town of Muridke in Punjab’s Sheikhupura district as residents observed the quick buildup of security forces in its streets.

A day earlier, hundreds of supporters of the now-proscribed Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) had arrived in town, en route to Islamabad, where they planned to stage a demonstration in support of Gaza and Palestine outside the US embassy. As they reached Muridke, roughly an hour’s drive from Lahore, where they had started the march, the protesters found there was no way to move forward as the police had dug trenches along the main roads.

Unwilling to turn back, the protesters had set up camp for the night on GT Road — the main artery linking Lahore to Gujranwala — intending to strategise on the next move in the morning. Before dawn, however, all hell broke loose.

Even a week after that fateful night between Oct 12 and 13, the almost one-kilometre stretch of GT Road, where the TLP had set up camp, bore marks of the deadly scuffles between the protesters and law enforcers. For the purpose of this report, Dawn spoke to a number of residents on both sides of GT Road, traders who run shops in the area and local correspondents affiliated with newspapers and TV channels.

On Oct 12, the local correspondents, who seldom find their news reports broadcast on national TV, suddenly found their phones buzzing nonstop as reports of law enforcers making their way to the town to take on the TLP protesters started surfacing. For residents, the thousands of law enforcers, including the Punjab Police, FC and Rangers, taking up positions in adjoining streets and corners was a worrying sight.

“We saw for the first time over 3,000 personnel of the FC and the Pakistan (Punjab) Rangers in the streets of Muridke on October 13,” a local trader, who runs a grocery shop in Malkan Wala Bazaar, told Dawn.

The trader, A*, lives with his five-member family in an adjoining street of the same bazaar and witnessed the entire saga unfold firsthand.

“Muridke city is home to three major bazaars — Malkan Wala, Tanki and Service Bazaar — on both sides of GT Road, and this is where the TLP protesters and police forces clashed early on October 13,” he reminisced.

As the night wore on, A* narrated, many of his friends and relatives who lived in the area exchanged messages with each other on what was going on in their respective streets and lanes. But communication wasn’t smooth either, likely due to the jammers activated by the law enforcers before they launched the crackdown, said A*.

“Some of my relatives and friends narrated that they saw unusually heavy movement of security........

© Dawn Prism