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| India-Pakistan |
| ANP leaders' assassination: a roundup |
| 2010-08-23 |
| Awami National Party (ANP) provincial leader Ubaidullah Yousafzai along with Saleem Akhtar, a cashier at PIA, was shot dead last week, which resulted in yet another chain reaction because of which more than a dozen people have lost their life and numerous vehicles have been burned. Daily Times on August 14, 2010 "Conspiracy to destabilise Karachi" was the first publication in Pakistan to have predicted and warned of such an assassination of the second-tier leadership of the ANP, MQM, PPP and the Sunni Tehreek citing multiple intelligence sources and investigations by Qari Zafar-led Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), which has recently been hired by al Qaeda in North Waziristan to do their "dirty work". Astonishingly, the ANP leader was targeted at a "high-security zone" by two armed motorcyclists. An intelligence officer who had followed the lead revelled, "Al Qaeda wants to create a Beirut out of Karachi and create such a situation where, somehow the armed forces are bogged down in Karachi, further stretching the army". "We don't have a clue about what's happening" a senior policeman said. "There's no intelligence sharing with us," he said. Daily Times investigations could reveal that the same hitmen who assassinated MQM's legislator, Raza Haider, killed ANP's Ubaidullah Yousafzai. Both the MQM and the ANP had become the boldest opponents of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan. The statement of Shahi Syed, the controversial leader of the ANP Sindh chapter about, "calling of army to Karachi" transformed into "we will not blame anyone" and "that extremists" are responsible for the killing pointing towards the Taliban came only when a certain agency briefed the central leadership of ANP to "calm things down in Karachi" and "not blame anyone". Obviously, the army is reluctant to come into the urban areas and open new fronts as it's already been stretched out. The intelligence agencies are now chalking out a strategy to deal with the current situation in Karachi in absence of the provincial government's writ in Sindh's capital. Interestingly, one of the two persons arrested by the Karachi Police is of Burmese origin, which confirms LeJ's involvement, as LeJ had previously used another Burmese national to assassinate Imam Turabi in Karachi. As a former Western intelligence officer who had previously worked in Pakistan told Daily Times, "Karachi's situation is now controlled by people in North Waziristan as they now have the remote control, and unfortunately we will see them clicking the buttons in the near future -- there's no stopping it". |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Democracy third world style---one man, one bullet. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2010-08-23 07:10 |