Karachi violence: 31 dead as fragile peace shatters
KARACHI:
The fragility of calm in Karachi has been exposed yet again.
What started off as a back-and-forth between two gangs, albeit with shades of political jostling, built into another day of intense violence, amidst what seemed to be progress towards peace.
By the end of Thursday, at least 31 more people were killed in a blowout of warring that ran against the play of a relative lull in the violence-stricken metropolis – which now finds itself hurtling towards another security-cum-political crisis.
There was chaos at the police surgeon’s office on M A Jinnah Road in Karachi as staff scrambled to absorb a consistently increasing body count.
Police surgeon Hamid Pardhyar said that he has been at work since Wednesday evening because of the escalating killings.
The latest spurt of violence started on Wednesday night, which saw seven people killed, including the gunning down of a former MNA of the Pakistan Peoples Party and a popular social worker Waja Karim Daad in Karachi’s troubled Lyari area.
“Seventeen people had been killed till Wednesday night and since then, 22 more bodies were found in different parts of the city,” said Additional Inspector-General of Sindh Police (IGP) Saud Mirza.
But Mirza sought to dispel the impression that the police had been ineffective in controlling the violence.
However, shoddy work on part of inspectors has just made it worse for those at the police surgeon’s office where the body count is being maintained. Reports on the victims are being brought in without completing formalities, they said.
Behind the killings
Off the record, police officials admit that the violence is a spill-over and a so-called chain reaction between two warring gangs in Lyari, namely the Arshad Pappu/Ghaffar Zikri versus the Peoples Amn Committee/Baba Ladla group. They also admit they are helpless in controlling the situation as gangsters are allegedly supported by the ruling political party. On Thursday, Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Wassan said the killings were a result of kidnapping and killing of five Baloch youth.
But the Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) Karachi Division general-secretary Saeed Ghani says the party, as a matter of policy, doesn’t support or patronise any criminal group in Lyari or elsewhere in the city. Ghani said he doesn’t believe the messages turning up in gunny bags are directed at the PPP.
However, SSP South Naeem Shaikh refused to speak about the role of Lyari’s infamous gangsters but admitted that the solution lies in Lyari even while many bodies continue to be discovered in other parts of the city.
Source: Karachi Killings