Gunmen kidnapped a son of a former Pakistani prime minister yesterday, the final day of campaigning for landmark elections which the Pakistani Taliban have vowed to attack with suicide bombers.
Ali Haider Gilani was seized in a hail of gunfire on the outskirts of the city of Multan in Punjab Province. Police said his secretary was killed and five people wounded, including one of his guards.
“People came on a motorbike. They also had a car with them and they opened fire and abducted [former Pakistani prime minister] Yousuf Raza Gilani’s son, Ali Haider, in a black Honda,” police officer Khurram Shakur told reporters.
Gilani’s family is one of the most powerful in Multan and a key clan in the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), whose campaign for re-election has been dramatically curtailed by threats from the Pakistani Taliban.
The insurgents, who have dismissed the elections as unIslamic, say they have dispatched suicide bombers to mount attacks on polling day tomorrow.
There was no claim of responsibility for the abduction of Ali Haider Gilani, a provincial assembly candidate for the secular PPP whose two other brothers are standing for the national assembly.
Yousuf Raza Gilani was disqualified after being sacked and indicted by the Supreme Court last year for refusing to reopen corruption cases against the president.
“We are not being provided with a conducive atmosphere,” he told reporters in the capital, Islamabad, after the kidnapping, calling on PPP activists to remain “quiet and peaceful.”
Tomorrow’s vote will be a democratic milestone in a country ruled for half its history by the military, but the campaign has been marred by Taliban threats and attacks, which have killed at least 116 people since the middle of last month.
In the southwestern province of Baluchistan yesterday, gunmen opened fire at a candidate for the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) party, which is tipped to win the election, killing one of his supporters and wounding two others.
Regional assembly candidate Akbar Askani escaped unharmed from the attack in the town of Mand, provincial home secretary Akbar Hussain Durrani said.
In the northwest tribal district, a bomb killed one person and wounded six others at a gathering of the right-wing Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party in the troubled district of North Waziristan, officials said.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for any of yesterday’s attacks, but Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud has personally ordered suicide bombings on polling day, one of his commanders told reporters.
“The Taliban has dispatched several fedayeen [suicide bombers] to carry attacks on election across Pakistan,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Reporters saw a copy of a letter apparently sent from Mehsud to Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan, mapping out the nationwide plan for the bombings.
Pakistan has said it will deploy more than 600,000 security personnel on polling day, when the electorate of more than 86 million will choose a national parliament and four regional assemblies.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS