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Ethnic and criminal violence blamed on gangs has killed 65 people in Pakistan\u2019s financial capital of Karachi, with police the latest victims shot dead in a brazen ambush, officials said Saturday.<\/p>\nEthnic and criminal violence blamed on gangs has killed 65 people in Pakistan\u2019s financial capital of Karachi, with police the latest victims shot dead in a brazen ambush, officials said Saturday.<\/p>\n
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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.
Spiraling unrest is a major source of concern in Pakistan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 gun battles 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 neighborhood of Korangi, which had previously been immune from the troubles.
\u201cThese 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,\u201d senior police official Shaukat Hussain told AFP.
\u201cThe police returned fire and at least one attacker has been killed.\u201d
Television footage showed injured policemen being carried by their comrades and local residents into ambulances and private vehicles heading to hospital.
\u201cOur hospital has received 32 injured policemen, four of whom are critically injured. They all have gunshot wounds,\u201d 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.
\u201cWe have caught two attackers and we are interrogating them about others,\u201d 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 \u201csome 100 suspects had been arrested so far\u201d.
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\u2019s economic powerhouse, has seen its population explode since independence in 1947.
Its neighborhoods 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 Qaeda-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\u2019s worst-affected areas are impoverished and heavily populated neighborhoods where most of the criminal gangs are believed to be hiding.
Independent economist A.B. Shahid estimated that 20 percent of the city\u2019s business was shut down on Thursday with markets closed in southern neighborhoods 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 neighborhood.
\u201cAt 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,\u201d 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 \u201cWant more bodies?\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n
Source: AlArabiya<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ethnic and criminal violence blamed on gangs has killed 65 people in Pakistan\u2019s financial capital of Karachi, with police the latest victims shot dead in a brazen ambush, officials said Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c59-islamic-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n