Speaker Amir Hussain on Wednesday morning appointed a three-member committee to investigate the cause of fire that destroyed two rooms of the Services Branch of National Assembly on Tuesday evening. The committee is composed of Additional Secretary Shafiq and two Joint Secretaries Mukhtar Haider Shah and Kausar Ali Bukhari.
After inaugurating the regional conference on child protection on Wednesday morning the Speaker, in reply to a query from electronic media, rejected the suggestion that the Opposition might be involved.
He also dispelled the impression that documents of the Public Accounts Committee or records of Blue (official) Passports issued to Members had been affected "Only the services branch, the department that issues visitors' gallery cards, cheques for Members' remuneration and allotment of Parliamentary lodges suites have been affected by the fire," he said.
Records of all these transactions would be available respectively from the Finance and Accounts officer of the Assembly, the Passports Department and from the CDA Office at the Lodges. So, the loss, as regards documents and cheque transactions, would be nominal.
However, the Opposition acted rather hurriedly on this score. For instance, PPP information secretary Sherry Rahman e-mailed a statement to media expressing deep concern at, what she called, 'the mysterious fire'.
On entering the Parliament building on Wednesday morning the newsmen smelled the putrid the odour and saw smoke coming from all directions. Carpets had been removed from the second floor and the third floor and water was flowing on several floors.
The use of large quantities of water had exposed the cracks in the building, though repairs in this department had been carried out several times, and the cracks were still there to drip the building during heavy rains.
According to an official, neither the air-conditioning plant nor the telephone exchange was functioning normally. He said no alarm warning was heard at the time of fire, which meant that the smoke warning equipment had stopped functioning.
A member of Parliament security staff informed the newsmen that previous evening the fire brigade had to use a number of ladders to climb up the fourth floor and break open the windows of the services branch to carry water hoses there.
Shortcoming witnessed in the National Assembly fire come to the fore again in Tuesday night's blaze on the 4th floor of National Assembly as were on November 9, 1994.
Then the local fire brigade could not get into the building the way it has been constructed and, therefore, one could not find a way to reach the fire in the central hall of the building. Fire machines of Pakistan Air Force were then called and they had to use layer upon layer of ladders to get to the top and carry thousands of metres of water pipes.
It was also discovered then that not enough water was available in the precincts to control the fire, and had to be brought from far away to control the damage. There was another parallel. Then, as now, the fire had been caused by electric short-circuiting, and the fire broke out in the evening, at nearly the same time.
It was decided to post security and watch and ward staff at every point of the building so that any abnormal happening would at once be reported. Thirteen years is a long time. During this time, some vigilance measure could have been taken.
However, one remembers that the Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, acted to remove Secretary, National Assembly, his Joint Secretary Javaid Akhtar Shaikh and CDA Chairman Saeed Mehdi, because these two departments were engaged in blaming Assembly's security staff.