Heightened security following mob violence

Angry crowds rampaged through Pakistan’s capital on Tuesday, a day after a prominent Sunni leader was shot dead near Islamabad, setting a cinema on fire, smashing cars and traffic signals and vowing to avenge his death. Maulana Azam Tariq, the leader of the Millat-e Islamiya, formerly known as the Sipah-e Sahaba-ye Pakistan, which was one of five militant groups banned during a crackdown on extremists last year, was gunned down by unknown assailants on Monday as he was being driven to Islamabad to attend a session of parliament, of which he was a member. His driver and three bodyguards also died in the attack. "This is a conspiracy by Iran. Azam Tariq was opposed to their attempts to impose their will on the way we teach our religion to our people. They wanted us to change our Islamiya textbooks, so they used their agents to kill him," Mohammad bin Alam, a nephew of the slain leader, told IRIN from Tariq’s home city of Jhang in southern Punjab. Angry Sunni mourners had also attacked a Shi’ite mosque in Jhang, but there were no casualties because the mosque was empty at the time, police said. Minority Shi’ites make up only 15 percent of Pakistan’s population of roughly 149 million people. But Alam disassociated the Millat-e-Islamiya from the angry mourners who went on the rampage through Islamabad as well as in Jhang, where police were forced to fire in the air to keep frayed tempers at bay at Tariq’s funeral after his body was flown in by helicopter. "We do not know who the people are that have gone around destroying things, and we certainly do not have anything to do with them," Alam said, adding that his father, Tariq’s brother, had made announcements on a loud-hailer, asking aggrieved supporters to avoid letting their emotions go out of control. Earlier, incensed mobs swelled even more in anger after a funeral service outside the parliament building in Islamabad and marched through business centres, smashing cars, throwing stones at shop windows and torching a cinema, where at least one man died of suffocation, a witness said. "There were thousands of them, and the police could do nothing," Mohammad Javed, who works in a shop close to the cinema, said, adding that shop-owners had pulled their shutters down and run for their lives. The cinema was completely gutted from the inside. Allama Sajid Naqvi, who heads the Shi’ite organisation Tahrik-e Islami, formerly known as the Tahrik-e Ja'fari-ye Pakistan, whom Tariq opposed, told IRIN in Islamabad that the murders highlighted growing lawlessness, before stressing that neither his organisation nor any of its supporters were involved. "I don’t think there is any group in the Shi’ite community that could have carried out anything like this. Tahrik-e Islami is a part of the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal, and we are working together towards building peace and unity in the country. Whoever did this is just trying to create, and exploit, a situation to achieve their own ends," he said. Sectarian violence has plagued Pakistan, especially Jhang, for years, with prominent Sunni or Shi’ite leaders picked off at random in drive-by shootings or bombings. More than 50 people were killed in Quetta, the capital of the southwestern province of Balochistan, in July when suspected Sunni militants shot at worshippers in a mosque. And, on 3 October, six Shi’ites were killed in an attack on a bus in the southern port city of Karachi. Authorities beefed up security immediately after the attack, the interior ministry saying that agencies were on heightened alert across the country, with special focus on mosques and Shi’ite community centres. Olivier Brasseur, the acting resident coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IRIN in Islamabad that his organisation had issued a security briefing to its personnel, asking them to avoid unnecessary movement in the capital. "We will assess the situation tomorrow to see what else needs to be done," he said. "I don’t think it will have any impact on the implementation of our programmes. It might have some impact on programme activities, especially a UNDP programme on governance, where law and order is an important component, but, on the whole, I don’t think there should be any problems," he added.