Police fought running battles with stone-throwing anti-government protesters yesterday after authorities tried to detain opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, fanning a crisis that has alarmed the US.
Sharif is locked in a power struggle with the Pakistani president that threatens to paralyze politics in the nuclear-armed country and dilute its focus on tackling economic woes as well as Taliban militants operating along the Afghan border.
Hundreds of police surrounded the former prime minister’s residence in the eastern city of Lahore before dawn and detained him along with scores of his supporters, a party spokesman said.
PHOTO: AFP
Officers showed party officials an order placing Sharif and his politician brother, Shahbaz, under house arrest for three days, spokesman Pervaiz Rasheed said.
But Sharif later denounced the order as illegal and left the house in a convoy of vehicles packed with chanting, flag-waving supporters, headed for a downtown rally that had already turned violent.
“These are the decisive moments,” Sharif told supporters before climbing into a car. “I tell every Pakistani youth that this is not the time to stay home; Pakistan is calling you to come and save me.”
Rao Iftikhar, a senior government official, said authorities had decided to relax restrictions on Sharif so that he could address the rally and return home.
Lawyers and opposition party supporters had planned to gather near Lahore’s main court complex before heading toward Islamabad to stage a mass sit-in front of Parliament, in defiance of a ban.
To thwart them, authorities parked trucks across major roads on the edge of the city and riot police took up positions outside the railway station and government buildings.
Still, thousands of flag-waving demonstrators pushed past police barricades to reach the courts.
Protesters pelted some of the hundreds of riot police ringing the area with rocks, triggering running clashes. A reporter saw one officer led away with a head wound.
Police repeatedly fired tear gas, scattering the crowd, and beat several stragglers with batons, only for the demonstrators to return with fresh supplies or sticks and stones.
Mobs accompanying Sharif’s swelling convoy smashed the windows of buses parked along the route. Others set fire to tires, sending plumes of black smoke into the blue sky over a usually bustling boulevard littered with stones and empty tear gas shells.
Shahbaz Sharif and a host of other protest leaders went underground to dodge detention orders. Iftikhar said they included the head of Pakistan’s main Islamist party and cricketer star-turned-politician Imran Khan.
TV images showed police commandos wearing flak jackets and armed with assault rifles apparently searching for Shahbaz in Rawalpindi, just south of the capital.
Shahbaz, speaking to Geo TV by telephone, appealed to Pakistanis to come out onto the streets.
“[President Asif Ali] Zardari has put the nation into this deep crisis by breaking his promises,” he said. “These fascist tactics cannot stop the masses who want justice.”
Washington worries that the crisis is preventing the government from being an effective ally in the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan and is encouraging both sides to compromise.
Suspected militants attacked a transport terminal in northwestern Pakistan used to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan before dawn yesterday and torched dozens of containers and military vehicles, police said.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
COORDINATION, ASSURANCE: Separately, representatives reintroduced a bill that asks the state department to review guidelines on how the US engages with Taiwan US senators on Tuesday introduced the Taiwan travel and tourism coordination act, which they said would bolster bilateral travel and cooperation. The bill, proposed by US senators Marsha Blackburn and Brian Schatz, seeks to establish “robust security screenings for those traveling to the US from Asia, open new markets for American industry, and strengthen the economic partnership between the US and Taiwan,” they said in a statement. “Travel and tourism play a crucial role in a nation’s economic security,” but Taiwan faces “pressure and coercion from the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]” in this sector, the statement said. As Taiwan is a “vital trading
RSS