A wave of violence between rival political factions is sweeping Pakistan’s biggest city of Karachi, with at least 26 people killed in the past week, police said yesterday.
Karachi port is the main gateway for Western military supplies bound for Afghanistan and serious insecurity could disrupt shipments and pile pressure on the government.
While the violence has been confined to targeted tit-for-tat shootings, there are fears street clashes could erupt in the country’s commercial hub, which is home to its main port and financial markets.
The violence in the city of 16 million people is between Karachi’s dominant political force, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and a breakaway faction known as the Mohajir Qaumi Movement, or Haqiqi group, as they vie for influence.
Karachi police chief Waseem Ahmed said that 26 people had been killed in targeted attacks this month up to Sunday, with most of the dead members of the breakaway faction. Other police officials said five people were killed yesterday.
“Karachi is totally anarchic at the moment as there is a serious command and control problem in the political factions,” said Mutahir Ahmed, a professor of international relations at the University of Karachi.
Stock analysts say investors are getting used to daily violence in the northwest, although fighting in the Swat valley northwest of Islamabad has unnerved the market over recent weeks.
But violence in Karachi has a more direct impact.
“If the trouble escalates, that could potentially be the last nail in the coffin for our market,” said Sajid Bhanji, a dealer at brokers Arif Habib Ltd.
Karachi has a long history of ethnic, religious and sectarian violence. Both factions draw their support from families of people who moved to Pakistan from India upon independence from Britain in 1947.
Those people, known as mohajir, or immigrants, flocked to Karachi where they competed for political and economic power with native Sindhis and later with Pashtuns.
The MQM is part of the federal coalition and governs in Sindh province, of which Karachi is capital.
Faisal Subzwari, a provincial minister from the MQM, blamed the Haqiqi group for the violence.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress