The leader of a banned Sunni Islam militant outfit was shot dead in southern Pakistan on Monday, sparking sectarian rioting in Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi, police said.
Allamma Ali Sher Haideri was killed along with one of his associates in the shooting at Pir Jo Goth village, Khairpur district, in southern Sindh province, senior police official Pir Muhammed Shah told Agence France-Presse.
He said the attacker was killed after Haideri’s guards returned fire, and that several of Haideri’s men were wounded in the incident.
Haideri led the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a Sunni extremist outfit blamed for a string of sectarian attacks across Pakistan against Shi’ites.
Shah said he suspected a personal grudge was the motive for the killing and said the attacker had been identified.
The killing sparked rioting in the volatile southern port city of Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, where angry mobs burnt a bus and a car and fired gunshots into the air, local police official Abdul Karim said.
Shah said that all shops and business also shut their doors in Khairpur district, about 400km north of Karachi.
”We have deployed a maximum police force in the district while paramilitary Rangers are also there to help us,” he said.
Life came to standstill as strikes were observed in towns across Sindh province and in parts of neighbouring Punjab province, residents said.
”Police … were deployed in sensitive areas and we are protecting the life and property of the people,” said Salman Chaudhry, the police chief in Jhang town, where SSP was formed in the early 1980s.
Shi’ites account for about 20% of Pakistan’s mostly Sunni Muslim population of 160-million. More than 4 000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the late 1980s. — Sapa-AFP