LAST YEAR 2010 AUGUST:
Karachi riots leave 45 dead after MP assassinatedGunmen swarm Pakistani city's streets seeking revenge after politician Raza Haider killed in gangland-style hit
Share81 reddit this Huma Imtiaz in Karachi and Declan Walsh guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 August 2010 19.18 BST Article history
A van burns in Karachi during an outbreak of deadly violence. Photograph: Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images
An uneasy calm reigned in the Pakistani city of Karachi tonight after the assassination of a senior politician triggered city-wide riots that left 45 people dead and more than 100 wounded.
Buildings and vehicles were set ablaze and angry mobs surged through the streets of the country's largest city after Raza Haider, an MP with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), was killed in a gangland-style hit on Monday night.
The violence underscored bubbling ethnic and political tensions in Karachi, a sprawling seaside metropolis that is home to 16 million people and Pakistan's most important port, banks and stock exchange.
Four assailants gunned down Haider, who is a parliamentarian in the Sindh assembly, in a city mosque during a funeral service. Anarchy gripped the city over the following hours as gunmen swarmed through the streets, seeking revenge.
The MQM, which ruled Karachi until earlier this year, represents the city's Mohajir community; most of those killed and injured in the reprisal shootings came from the smaller Pashtun community.
At the Jinnah postgraduate medical centre, where 54 people were being treated, ambulance drivers said most of the injured had been shot at point-blank range and appeared to have been targeted for their ethnicity.
"Most of the injured are Pashtuns, with a few Sindhis and Punjabis among the victims," said one source.
Jan Sardar, a 35-year-old Pashtun, was shot seven times. "When they fired the first shot, I jumped in a sewer to save myself, but they came after me and fired more bullets," he said from his hospital bed. The gunman was carrying an MQM flag, he added.
Clothes trader Ahmed Shah, who was shot in the leg, was travelling in a bus with 50 passengers when it came under fire.
"I didn't see who it was; it was dark," he said. A cousin said he saw seven dead bodies at the site.
Iqbal Hussain, a teenager from Swat, said he was left for dead after a gunman burst into his house in north Karachi, opening fire. A less fortunate friend was killed.
Officials at the Edhi Foundation rescue service said at least 100 people had been injured, with some unidentified bodies still lying in the morgue. Police put the death toll at 46.
Schools, business and markets did not open today and the streets were largely deserted. MQM leaders and hundreds of party supporters attended funeral prayers for Haider and his bodyguard Muhammad Khalid at Jinnah Ground in the MQM's Azizabad stronghold.
Despite threats of violence the funeral passed peacefully and an uneasy calm prevailed for the rest of the day. Authorities ordered schools and colleges to remain closed and paramilitary rangers were deployed to keep the peace.
The MQM, which is the dominant party in Karachi, blamed the Pashtun-dominated Awami National party, whose power base is in north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, for Haider's killing. Scores of people died in political violence in Karachi earlier this year but Haider was the first sitting parliamentarian to be killed.
He was targeted for having "raised his voice against criminal elements in pockets of the city," said Faisal Subzwari, a senior MQM politician. "He was under threat for being outspoken. And we know who are behind his murder," Subzwari told Dawn newspaper.
The police, however, blamed the killing on Taliban and sectarian outfits. City police chief Waseem Ahmed blamed the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan. "We have credible information that this was done by the SSP. We have arrested 12 of their associates and are interrogating them at the moment," he said.
In Islamabad, the federal interior minister, Rehman Malik, said that 20 people had been arrested.
Karachi has a history of political bloodshed stretching back to the late 1980s when the city was regularly rocked by political and ethnic shootings that killed dozens every week. Analysts say the city is again in the grip of a political turf war.
"The MQM had virtual complete control over Karachi for the past decade; now other parties are fighting back, and this violence is a backlash to that," said analyst Cyril Almeida. "Until fresh local government elections are held, this will continue."
But, Almeida added, the origin of the violence was "murky". "There are tons of conspiracy theories, especially about why these incidents spike whenever there's a civilian government in power."
The MQM, which is in coalition with President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's party in the federal government, has warned that the influx of ethnic Pashtuns into Karachi risks a rise of "Talibanisation" in Pakistan's largest city.
ANP officials deny the allegations, saying most Pashtuns do not support the Taliban, and accuse the MQM of playing dangerous ethnic politics to gain political advantage.
THIS YEAR 2011 AUGUST :
Target killing in Karachi claims 436 lives in first quarter of 2011
At least 436 people have been killed on the first quarter of the current year in the result of ongoing wave of target killings in Karachi, official sources said. An official source demanding anonymity told a foreign news agency on Saturday from Karachi that 436 people had been reportedly killed during the first three months of 2011 as the result of armed clashes among different ethnic, religious, political and mafia groups in the city. Day to day death counting showed that such incidents, only in the month of March, claimed over 190 lives in the city. But Karachi police surprisingly, hiding the original figures, estimated the counting of killed persons at only 109 from January to March.
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