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 yesterday.
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 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 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.
Source : The Daily Star
