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Senior leader Zara Shahid Hussain of Imran Khan's party killed
Reuters | Updated: May 19, 2013 08:26 IST
Islamabad: Gunmen killed a senior female politician from a reformist party in Pakistan on Saturday night, the latest violent incident in a bloody election campaign and one that set off a war of words between two major opposition parties.
Around 150 people were killed in the run-up to national elections held last week, which handed a landslide victory to opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N party.
It marked the first time an elected government replaced another one in a nation that has been run by military leaders for more than half its history.
Results from a handful of constituencies are still awaited amid accusations of vote-rigging. The shooting came hours ahead of repolling in a key area beset by allegations of voting fraud.
It was not immediately clear who killed Zara Shahid Hussain, a senior member of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. The PTI has promised to reduce endemic corruption in the nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people.
The PTI's leader, former international cricket star Imran Khan, immediately blamed the killing on the Muttahida Quami Movement. The MQM has a stranglehold on politics in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi.
"Her death has sent shockwaves across the rank and file of the party," Khan said in a statement.
Police said that two gunmen shot Hussain dead outside her home in an upscale neighborhood of Karachi, he said.
"I hold (MQM leader) Altaf Hussain directly responsible for the murder as he openly threatened PTI workers and leaders through public broadcasts," he added in a tweet.
"I also hold the British government responsible as I had warned them about British citizen Altaf Hussain after his open threats."
MQM leader Hussain is wanted on murder charges in Pakistan and leads his party remotely from exile in England. His party is designated a terrorist organization by Canada, a charge it strongly denies.
In recent days he gave a speech which many Pakistanis felt was an incitement to attack political rivals. The British police have been flooded with complaints demanding an investigation.
The MQM leader insisted his words were taken out of context. MQM leaders held a press conference within hours of Hussain's death to disclaim responsibility and demand a retraction from Khan.
Khan's election campaign electrified many Pakistanis, pushing the PTI from a marginal party with no seats in the legislature to become Pakistan's third largest party.
National polls held a week ago gave the MQM 18 out of 19 national assembly seats in its power base in Karachi. Repolling is due to be held on Sunday in the final constituency, thought to be a stronghold of PTI, after many polling stations failed to open on election day.
The steamy port city of Karachi is Pakistan's financial heart and home to 18 million people. It typically sees about a dozen murders a day, a deadly combination of political killings, attacks by Taliban and sectarian militant groups, and street crime.
Zahra Shahid Hussain, senior leader of Imran Khan's party, shot just hours before re-polling took place in port city.
Last Modified: 19 May 2013 12:48
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A senior member of Pakistani politician Imran Khan's party has been killed in Karachi in an attack, after an election campaign that claimed scores of people nationwide.
Zahra Shahid Hussain, central vice-president of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party and one of its founding members, was killed late on Saturday, just hours before re-elections took place on Sunday.
The motives behind the attack remained unclear.
Hussain "was leaving her home for some work when three gunmen attacked her. She thought they wanted to snatch her purse and handed it over to them but they killed her", Firdous Shamim, a local PTI leader, told the AFP news agency.
Police said all three assailants escaped after the attack late on Saturday.
"They shot her with one bullet near her chin and she could not survive," Nasir Aftab, senior police official, told AFP.
Last week's election, during which 150 people were killed nationwide, gave the rival Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which controls Karachi, 18 of 19 National Assembly seats in the port city.
The constituency where Sunday's repoll took place, known as NA-250, is thought to be a stronghold of the PTI.
'Charged political debate'
Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from the capital Islamabad, said: "The very initial reports surrounding the killing of Zahra Shahid Hussain indicate that this could have been a robbery, for Karachi is prone to violence."
On average 12 people are killed in Karachi every single day, he said.
Our correspondent said a message on Twitter sent out by Khan, accusing MQM of being behind the attack, had "charged the political debate in Pakistan".
Khan and a party spokesperson condemned the killing and denounced it as a security failure on the part of the provincial government.
Altaf Hussain, the MQM leader, is wanted on murder charges in Pakistan and leads his party remotely from self-imposed exile in England.
The MQM is designated as a terrorist organisation by Canada, a charge it strongly denies. The party says the murder cases against Altaf Hussain are politically motivated.
Hussain gave a speech recently which many Pakistanis felt was an incitement to attack political rivals, but he insisted his words were taken out of context.
Re-polling in Karachi
Arif Alvi, the PTI's candidate for the NA-250 constituency in Karachi, which saw re-polling in 43 polling stations on Sunday, condemned the killing but said he did not expect justice to be done.
"She was an asset of the party ... and I believe the Sindh [provincial] government should investigate this murder, look for the killers and get them sentenced. But, unfortunately, over the last five years, nobody has ever been arrested for [political] killings or tried in a court of law," Alvi said at the hospital where Hussain's body was taken.
Thousands of security personnel had been deployed for the re-elections in Karachi.
The Election Commission of Pakistan ordered re-polling at the 43 polling stations in the Karachi constituency of NA-250 following allegations of vote-rigging in the May 11 polls, which marked the first democratic transition of power in Pakistan.
PTI and the Jamaat-e-Islami party have staged nationwide protests against the alleged rigging.
The Pakistan People's Party and the MQM have announced a boycott, demanding that re-polling be held in all of the polling stations in NA-250, not just in the 43 that the ECP has designated.
Last weekend's election saw about 50 million Pakistanis vote, with Nawaz Sharif, a centre-right former prime minister, emerging the winner nearly 14 years after he was deposed in a coup.
The Taliban, who denounce democracy as un-Islamic, killed more than 150 people during the election campaign, including 24 on polling day.
Imran Khan blames rival Pakistan party leader for killing of activist
Leader of Tehreek-e-Insaf party says Altaf Hussain's Muttahida Qaumi Movement behind death of Zahra Shahid Hussain
Jon Boone in Islamabad
The Guardian Sunday 19 May 2013 20.30 BST
Imran Khan's Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party activists protest against the killing of Zahra Shahid. Photograph: Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images
Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, on Sunday blamed the killing of a political activist on the eve of a partial rerun of voting in Karachi on Altaf Hussain, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) leader, who runs his party from exile in London.
Zahra Shahid Hussain, the vice-president of Khan's PTI party in the southern province of Sindh, was gunned down outside her home in the upmarket Defence area of Karachi on Saturday.
Police said she died from a shot to the head in an attack that might have been either an attempted mugging that turned deadly or a deliberate political killing. The attack came after a week of protests by PTI activists, who accused the MQM of attempting to intimidate PTI voters into not voting.
Since the 1980s the MQM has maintained a firm grip over Karachi, enjoying solid support from the city's community of mojahirs, the Urdu-speaking descendants of Muslims who moved to Pakistan from India in 1947.
The party has long been accused of having an illegal armed wing intimately involved in Karachi's criminal economy of drugs, extortion and land theft.
On Twitter on Sunday night, Khan, who is being treated for back injuries in hospital, said he held Altaf Hussain directly responsible for the murder of the 65-year-old as he had "openly threatened PTI workers and leaders through public broadcasts". He also criticised the UK for not taking action against Altaf Hussain: "I hold the British government responsible as I had warned them to act against Altaf Hussain after his open threats to kill PTI workers." Khan's attack on the MQM leader, a man few dare to publicly criticise, has capped a dire week for the party, which some commentators believe has been shocked by a weakening of its position in Karachi.
Although it has managed to cling to the 18 seats it had in the last parliament, it has seen its share of the vote fall by almost 10 percentage points and the PTI emerge as major challenger.
Last week Altaf Hussain responded furiously to PTI accusations of vote-rigging with a speech broadcast from London in which he appeared to threaten PTI demonstrators in the sprawling port city with violent retribution.
The Metropolitan police are examining whether he can be prosecuted for inciting violence.
"They have gone into shock over these results," said one Karachi-based security consultant. "People have voted against them because of their utter failure to do anything in the last five years. In retrospect, the PTI could have done even better if they had put more effort into Karachi."
Diplomats say Altaf Hussain's tirades and increasingly erratic behaviour are a growing source of embarrassment to party officials who manage MQM affairs in Pakistan. "They would be much happier if they could speak to him and vet what he says," one diplomat said.
Farooq Sattar, the most senior MQM leader in Pakistan, appeared to accept that Altaf Hussain had gone too far with his speech from London, saying the MQM leader had retracted his remarks and offered an apology.
In the early hours of Sunday he lambasted members of the MQM's central committee for failing to defend the party against media criticism and Khan's explosive accusations.
The MQM, with its solid block of seats in parliament, is used to remaining in power, regardless of which party heads the government.
For the past five years, the MQM has enjoyed enormous influence by being a key coalition partner of the government led by the Pakistan Peoples party (PPP), which was trounced in the election on 11 May.
But Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party, has won enough seats in the election to ignore the MQM.
The prospect of the MQM having much-reduced political influence in Islamabad has raised fears it could once again resort to the sort of violence and intimidation that party officials have claimed they have been trying to put behind them.
Sattar, the senior MQM leader, accused Khan of further inflaming a city already vulnerable to violent confrontations between the ethnic groups that live there. "The killing of Zahra Shahid Hussain was a conspiracy by someone who wants to take advantage, to bring Karachi to another test in terms of sectarian and political polarisation," he said.
Khan should wait for the results of a police investigation, he said, adding that the MQM would launch a defamation action against the former cricket star.
Election authorities ordered fresh voting at 43 polling centres in a largely upmarket area of Karachi where there were reports of serious irregularities, including ballot-stuffing and attempts to intimidate voters in the national elections.
The MQM and other parties boycotted the new poll after demanding the election be rerun in the entire constituency.
One PTI voter, called Ashar, who ventured to a polling station at a school in the Defence neighbourhood which was the scene of protests last week, described the killing of Zahra Shahid as "despicable". "It is purely political, because of the power struggle happening right now," he said.
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