Politician's murder fits pattern of targeted killings by militants: analyst

The murder of a popular opposition politician on Thursday in the violence-wracked southern port city of Karachi by unknown gunmen seems to fit the pattern of high-profile public figures being targeted by militants seeking revenge for the continued military offensive launched by Pakistani forces in the north-west tribal regions of the country, according to an analyst. Munawar Suhrwardy, the information secretary of the Pakistan Peoples Party’s Sindh chapter, was shot and seriously injured by unknown assailants in central Karachi on Thursday. He died shortly afterwards in a local hospital. Police described the murder as a “targeted killing”. “Until we get more details, it would be hasty to draw conclusions,” Dr. Riffat Hussain, the chairman of the department of defence and strategic studies at the prestigious Quaid-e-Azam University, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad on Friday. “But it [Suhrwardy’s death] certainly fits the pattern of high-profile personalities being targeted by these people and one cannot rule out the possibility of its roots being traced back to Wana [in the South Waziristan tribal area, where the military action is taking place],” he added. Suhrwardy’s death came exactly a week after a senior military commander narrowly escaped being killed in a daring daylight ambush on a main Karachi thoroughfare. Thirteen people were killed in the attack, including soldiers accompanying the targeted general and policemen. “He was a very popular political grass-roots activist,” Iqbal Haider, a senior member of the Pakistan Peoples Party who served as law minister under exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, told IRIN from Karachi. Haider agreed with the perception that a recent surge in violence in Karachi, including two separate suicide bombings in mosques in the past month, as well as the killing of a senior cleric, could be a backlash against the Pakistani army’s offensive targeting suspected Islamic militants holed up on high ground in the country’s north-western tribal region, along the border with Afghanistan. “We know that Karachi has been the scene of violence for a very long time, both ethnic and sectarian. But I think, after 9/11, you have a kind of new Al-Qaeda/Taliban dimension added to that which has contributed significantly to the recent wave of attacks,” Hussain said. The Pakistani government has claimed that most of the recent violence, one way or the other, is related to the resistance or the “backlash activities” of Al-Qaeda elements whom they are trying to track down in Wana, he added. “In Karachi, violence has many dimensions: ethnic, sectarian, Al-Qaeda, ideological and now, of course you have ordinary criminal elements getting involved in it. It has never been so bad as it has been over the past four years,” he maintained. On Thursday, interior minister Faisal Saleh Hayat was quoted by the print media as having told the country’s national assembly that 330 people had been killed across the country in 82 acts of terrorism over the past year and a half. The southern province of Sindh, of which Karachi is the capital, had the highest body count, he said, with 109 people killed in 62 terrorist incidents.