A relative applies ointment on the burnt face of Sunil Prakash Kakade, a 28-year-old man injured in the blast, at Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad on Sunday. (AP)

Ahmedabad, July 27: As an orthopaedic surgeon at Civil Hospital, Prerak Shah, 32, would have been preparing for a busy night tending to one blast injured after another as they were wheeled in.

Instead, he was blown up with his wife and unborn child as last evening’s terrorists made the hospital their 16th and last target, hitting the injured a second time and turning a healer into a victim.

The bomb went off in a car in the parking lot as the young doctor and his wife, who had just arrived for a gynaecological check-up, walked past the trauma centre yards from the site.

Kinjal Shah, 28 and five months pregnant, had come from the couple’s hometown Modasa, 150km away, where she lived with her in-laws. Colleagues said Dr Shah, who had just cleared his MS finals, was planning to give up his job as resident doctor and open his own clinic in Modasa.

He had already been lucky once yesterday — there had been one blast in the hospital car park a few minutes earlier, causing some casualties. It wasn’t clear if Dr Shah was treating patients at the trauma centre at the time or whether his wife had arrived.

“It was the second, more powerful blast that killed them,” said a doctor who would not give his name. The two blasts killed 19 in all, including a first-year student from the attached B.J. Medical College, the second explosion scattering body parts across a large area.

“There was a blue flash; that’s all I remember,” said Lakshman Chudasama, a social worker who had been bringing in blast victims and is now fighting for his own life.

Early this morning, Dr Shah’s parents arrived and quietly took away the bodies of their son and daughter-in-law, the first two to undergo a post-mortem. The young couple, who had married a year ago after falling in love, were cremated together this evening in their hometown.

Dr Shah had been studying and working at Civil Hospital for over a decade, having done his MBBS from B.J. Medical College. Kinjal had been a medical representative at Modasa till she resigned after becoming pregnant.

Among the other dead was Sanket Andharai, a physiotherapy student of B.J. Medical College who was being treated for malaria.

Hospital employee Purushottam Patel died with grandchildren Shradda, 8, and Rohan, 10, who had just brought his dinner from home.

Many indoor patients left the hospital today. Amid the atmosphere of fear came news that a car bomb had been defused near the trauma ward of Surat’s Puna Hospital. It was a Maruti 800, with a Vadodara registration.

A doctor said: “I used to think hospitals were safe places, but my faith has been shaken.”

Militants or warring nations rarely target hospitals, and when a group of rebels did so in Kashmir a few years ago, they promptly apologised. In Baghdad, however, rebels fired a missile at the 22-storey, 700-bed Medical City health complex four years ago, causing heavy casualties.

Experts say terrorists can easily enter hospitals by posing as visitors, patients or care assistants. In case of an attack, evacuation of non-ambulant patients from wards can be painfully slow.

Israel’s Rambam Hospital (in Haifa) and West Galilee Hospital (in Nahariya) have moved whole wards to underground bomb shelters containing hundreds of beds.

The second bomb at Civil Hospital was placed in a car, also with a Vadodara number, parked near the trauma centre’s wards 1 and 2 where lines of stretchers were bringing in critical patients to the ICU.

Officers said the car was packed with detonators and small gas cylinders. Four mangled cylinders and 16 detonators – implying there were 16 bombs -- were found. The car was smashed into fragments, like the motorcycles and cycles parked nearby.

Yesterday, sleuths had spoken of a human bomb after a headless torso was found.

Doctors who have fallen victim to militants include Israel’s David Applebaum, an expert in treating terror victims. He and daughter Nava, 20, died in a suicide strike on a Jerusalem café in September 2003, days before her wedding.

The family of Dr Sneha Philip, an Indian-origin US doctor, recently won a legal battle to get her name added to the list of 9/11 victims.