Scientist Studies Suicide Bombings , By TOM WRIGHT

LAHORE, Pakistan—A U.S.-educated Fulbright scholar is giving the government some special advice in building a software park intended to help turn this city into a regional tech hub: how to defend it from suicide bombers, in a sign of how everyday life in Pakistan is shaping itself around an ongoing threat.

Rather than focusing on how to prevent attacks, computer scientist Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani advises on how to minimize casualties. That includes determining where to position security guards and set up barricades, and how to position a crowd and speaker at an event that could be targeted.

Pakistani suicide-bombing specialist Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, right, meets with engineers in the construction of a Lahore software park.

 

He also wanted his model to forecast the kind of injuries suffered by victims of suicide bombings in crowded public places. Mr. Usmani sent volunteer medical students out across Pakistan to cull autopsy records of victims of hundreds of suicide bombings. His finding: Explosions at mosques, where devotees sit in rows, were less deadly than those at markets where people are randomly arrayed, because people in lines shielded each other from the blast.

Event organizers can reduce deaths and injuries from a suicide attack by up to a quarter by using rows rather than circular seating or allowing crowds to form randomly, Mr. Usmani says.

Several years ago, Mr. Usmani, the youngest of 14 children from a rural area of Sindh province, was a Fulbright scholar at the Florida Institute of Technology, watching as the Pakistan Taliban unleashed a wave of suicide bombers across his native country.

The number of suicide attacks in Pakistan surged from seven in 2007 to 63 in 2008, killing 889 people, and 87 last year, killing 1,299, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based independent organization.

Mr. Usmani dropped pure computer science—though his natural aptitude for it had lifted him out of poverty—to turn his doctoral studies toward creating software to model the effects of suicide bombings.

Mr. Usmani took courses in psychology and biology to help understand how crowds react during a suicide bombing. His advisers were at first concerned by his lack of focus on computer sciences, but later they relented. "He looks for ideas all the time and has done well at pulling together a variety of disciplines," said Richard Griffith, an associate professor of organizational psychology who helped to oversee Mr. Usmani's work.

Mr. Usmani's work is likely to have limits in how accurately it can simulate blasts. Keith Clutter, founder of Analytical & Computational Energies Inc., a Texas-based company that sells blast-modeling software for $25,000 a license, says the kind of empirical data from controlled explosions that Mr. Usmani relies on is decades old.

High-tech computational fluid-dynamic research, such as that used by Mr. Clutter's company, allows for more accurate simulation of blasts, Mr. Usmani concedes. But he says the high cost and skill needed to operate such software make it unsuitable for use in Pakistan. Mr. Usmani plans to charge between $2,000 to $6,000 per consulting job.

His skills also have been used by investigators. In January, Mr. Usmani was able to help police in Karachi after a bombing in December of a Shiite religious procession by Sunni extremists killed over 40 people.

Police initially believed it was a suicide attack. Mr. Usmani found the injuries—to one side of the blast's epicenter, rather than surrounding it—were more in line with a planted explosive, Mr. Usmani said.

Javed Akbar Riaz, superintendent of police for the area of Karachi where the blast occurred, said Mr. Usmani's opinion helped to determine it wasn't a suicide attack.

In Lahore, the Punjab Information Technology Board, which is building a sleek glass-and-steel tower for the new software hub, wants its new building to house a complex for suicide-bombing studies that is centered on Mr. Usmani's consulting company and hosts other computer programmers working, under his tutelage, on bomb-blast software.

"Definitely terrorism is a problem here and we would like to utilize our best minds to counter this," says Jawaid Abdul Ghani, chairman of the IT Board and a computer-science graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Pakistan could become the best place for counterterrorism studies."