Shops, businesses and schools were shut yesterday across Pakistan’s financial capital, Karachi, braced for further unrest after the killing of a politician and a night of sporadic shootings.
Manzar Imam, 42, a lawmaker from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a coalition partner in the federal government and the dominant political party in Karachi, was shot with three of his guards in a drive-by shooting on Thursday.
TALIBAN’S GIFT
Pakistan’s umbrella Taliban faction claimed responsibility for his death and threatened further attacks on the party.
“This was a first gift to MQM and we assure the people of Karachi that we will soon free them from MQM’s clutches,” Tehreek-e-Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
“MQM is a secular party and we will increase such attacks against them,” he said.
Karachi last year saw its deadliest year in two decades, with about 2,000 people killed in violence linked to ethnic and political tensions, raising fears over elections due this year.
Overnight violence, linked to ethnic and politically linked tensions in Karachi, left five people dead and about 30 wounded, police said.
Markets shut, streets were deserted and schools closed, with office attendance thin although government departments, the port and stock exchange remained open.
Hyderabad, the second-largest city after Karachi in the southern province of Sindh, was similarly shut down and people burnt tires to protest Imam’s killing.
It is the second shooting of an MQM provincial lawmaker in just more than two years in the city, Pakistan’s business center with a population of 18 million.
The death of MQM lawmaker Raza Haider in an ambush in August 2010 sparked a fierce wave of ethnic and politically linked violence that killed scores of people.
In other news, police yesterday said that an officer who was investigating a corruption case against Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf was found dead in the nation’s capital.
Senior police officer Bani Yamin said the body of Kamran Faisal was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his room at a government dorm in Islamabad yesterday. Yamin said police were investigating whether Faisal committed suicide.
Faisal’s death came days after the Supreme Court ordered the arrest of Ashraf and 15 others in connection with an old corruption case the officer was investigating.
The prime minister was implicated in the case when he was minister of water and power. At the time, he oversaw the import of short-term power stations that cost the government millions of dollars but produced little energy.
Meanwhile, a cleric who has been pushing for electoral reforms will resort to street protests again if the government does not abide by an agreement that eased a political crisis, an aide said yesterday.
POLITICAL DEAL
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, who has a history of ties with the military, reached a deal with Pakistan’s ruling coalition on Thursday that will give his party some say over the formation of a caretaker government ahead of elections this spring. Qadri’s party may also participate in the elections.
The cleric’s reappearance on Pakistan’s political stage a few weeks ago after years of living in Canada and his calls for the military to play a role in forming an interim administration have raised speculation he may be backed by the country’s powerful army. Qadri and the military deny this.
The cleric, who led four days of street protests in the heart of the capital aimed at forcing the government to resign, will keep pushing for political reforms and a halt to corruption, his spokesman said.
Aside from giving Qadri a voice in who leads the caretaker administration, the government also agreed to dissolve parliament before a scheduled date of March 16, although it did not specify a date.
It also said elections would be held within 90 days of the dissolution and electoral reforms would continue to be discussed.
An announcement of an election date could come during a parliament session on Monday.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the