KARACHI : Ethnic and criminal violence blamed on gangs has killed 65
people in Pakistan's financial capital of Karachi, with police the
latest victims shot dead in a brazen ambush, officials said Saturday.
The
government has been left struggling for solutions to the worst wave of
unrest to sweep the city in 16 years as extra deployments of police and
paramilitary officers appear unable to stem the troubles.
Spiralling
unrest is a major source of concern in Pakistan's biggest city, which
is used by NATO to ship the bulk of its supplies to troops fighting in
Afghanistan and which accounts for around a fifth of the country's GDP.
The
violence has been linked to ethnic tensions between the Mohajirs, the
Urdu-speaking majority represented by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement
(MQM), and Pashtun migrants affiliated to the Awami National Party
(ANP).
Gunmen ambushed police late on Friday, sparking
gunbattles in which four officers were killed and more than 30 others
wounded, officials said, bringing the death toll to 65 since Wednesday
morning.
The police commandos, dressed in plain clothes,
were targeted in the eastern neighbourhood of Korangi, which had
previously been immune from the troubles.
"These policemen
were in a van going on a raid on a tip-off when they were intercepted
by armed men who started firing, injuring many policemen," senior
police official Shaukat Hussain told AFP.
"The police returned fire and at least one attacker has been killed."
Television
footage showed injured policemen being carried by their comrades and
local residents into ambulances and private vehicles heading to
hospital.
"Our hospital has received 32 injured policemen,
four of whom are critically injured. They all have gunshot wounds,"
said Seemin Jamali, spokeswoman for the Jinnah Post Graduate Medical
Centre.
Karachi city police chief Saud Mirza told AFP that four police were killed.
Speaking
after the funerals of the dead policeman on Saturday, provincial police
chief Wajid Durrani said two of the attackers who fired at the police
van were arrested.
"We have caught two attackers and we
are interrogating them about others," Durrani said, adding that 18
people who were kidnapped on Friday had been retrieved by police.
Provincial
home minister Manzoor Wasan said he could not give details about which
parties or ethnic groups were involved in the violence, but said that
"some 100 suspects had been arrested so far".
Witnesses in
Korangi said there were pockets of intense gunfire between armed groups
with ordinary people too frightened to leave home. Dominated by Urdu
speakers, the area also has Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi populations.
Karachi,
currently a city of 18 million inhabitants and the country's economic
powerhouse, has seen its population explode since independence in 1947.
Its
neighbourhoods have been swollen by a huge influx of migrants from
across the country, but particularly the deprived Pashtun northwest,
looking for jobs and more recently to escape Taliban and
al-Qaida-linked violence.
Speaking off the record because
they were not authorized to release the information to the media, two
security officials confirmed that 65 people had now died in violence in
Karachi since Wednesday morning.
The city's worst-affected
areas are impoverished and heavily populated neighbourhoods where most
of the criminal gangs are believed to be hiding.
Independent
economist A.B. Shahid estimated that 20 per cent of the city's business
was shut down on Thursday with markets closed in southern
neighbourhoods to protest against extortion money demanded by criminal
gangs.
Underlining the brutality of the violence, one
security official said bodies of those kidnapped and killed had been
stuffed in sacks before being dumped in various parts of the city.
He
said the bullet-riddled bodies of four young men who worked for a
mobile phone company had been found in a van with their hands and feet
trussed in the impoverished Shershah neighbourhood.
"At
least 20 killed on Thursday were kidnapped and tortured by armed
gangsters. Their bodies were later stuffed in sacks and thrown away in
different areas," the security official told AFP on condition of
anonymity.
Notes had been left inside the pockets of clothes worn by some of the victims that read "Want more bodies?", the official said.
The
independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said 800 people have
been killed in Karachi so far this year, compared with 748 in 2010.
