52 killed in two days of Karachi violence

At least 52 people have been killed in a wave of street violence between rival ethnic groups and criminal gangs in Pakistan's financial capital of Karachi, police said Friday.

The mounting death toll over the past 48 hours in the country's biggest city comes despite the deployment of hundreds of additional police and paramilitary troops last month.
"At least 31 people were killed on Thursday and four more this morning," city police chief Saud Mirza told AFP.
"Some 17 people had been killed on Wednesday, taking the toll to 52," he said.

A security official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed the latest toll and blamed criminal gangs for most of the violence.
Independent economist A.B. Shahid estimated that 20 percent of the city's business was shut down Thursday with markets closed in southern neighbourhoods to protest against extortion money demanded by criminal gangs.

The federal and the provincial governments have struggled to quell the unrest, which this year has been at its deadliest in 16 years.
A former MP for the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Waja Karimdad, was among those killed in the most recent bout of violence.

Karachi is used by NATO to ship the bulk of its supplies to troops fighting in Afghanistan and accounts for around a fifth of the country's GDP.
Regular unrest, mainly in the form of gunfights and assassinations, 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).

Karachi, currently a city of 18 million and the economic powerhouse of the country, 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-Qaeda-linked violence.

Most of the killings have been reported in the southern Lyari neighbourhood, a PPP stronghold infested by powerful criminal gangs.
Karachi's worst-affected areas are impoverished and heavily populated neighbourhoods where most of the criminal gangs are believed to be hiding.

The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said 800 people have been killed in Karachi so far this year, compared with 748 in 2010.

 

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