KARACHI: Base Commander of PNS Mehran removed after attacks that killed 10 security personnel and destroyed two US-made aircraft.
Although a navy spokesman insisted the transfer was pre-planned and unconnected to the gun, grenade and rocket assault.
“Commodore Khalid Pervez is taking over as the base commander and his predecessor Raja Tahir will be assigned new responsibilities,” Commander Salman Ali, a navy spokesman, told AFP. He did not say what new job the outgoing commander will hold.
“It is a routine and scheduled transfer. The base commander was scheduled to be replaced, even if there was no attack on the facility,” he said.
The assault was the worst on a military base since the army headquarters was besieged in October 2009, and the fourth on the navy after three bombings in late April killed nine people.
The siege has forced authorities to consider relocating the navy’s main air base in Karachi away from its current populated area, near the international airport.
After the attack took an entire night and most of the day to repel, Admiral Noman Bashir, the chief of naval staff, conceded that relocation was possible.
Before the attack, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar, who went to China last week, said Islamabad has asked Beijing for help in building a naval base at its deep-sea port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea west of Karachi.
“When the Mehran base was established 36 years ago it was far from the population. But now it is surrounded by civilian populations on all sides, thus the security risks have multiplied,” said Commander Ali.
He said it would be impossible to relocate each of the more than a dozen navy bases in Karachi, but that serious thought was going into Mehran, the only navy air base in the sprawling city of 16 million.
