ISLAMABAD, 8 October 2003 — One person was killed yesterday as thousands of emotionally charged mourners rampaged through Pakistani cities after funeral prayers for a slain Sunni extremist MP, torching buildings, hurling rocks and vowing revenge.
Azam Tariq, former head of the violent pro-Taleban Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) organization of Sunnis, was gunned down with his driver and three bodyguards as their car entered Islamabad on Monday afternoon.
Tariq was being driven to a sitting of the Parliament when gunmen in an unmarked car pulled alongside and pumped bullets into his car, police said.
No one has claimed responsibility but suspicion fell on rival Shiite extremists.
Yesterday’s violence erupted after sunrise funeral prayers attended by some 3,000 mourners in front of the national Parliament building in Islamabad.
Sunni leaders offered prayers and made fiery anti-Shiite speeches, while the crowd chanted, “We will revenge your martyrdom, we will revenge your killing.”
Three simple wooden coffins and two stretchers holding the bodies of Tariq, his driver and bodyguards were laid in the center of the crowd.
Rose petals were scattered on top of each. The national green and white flag adorned Tariq’s coffin.
As the funeral crowds dispersed enraged mobs brandishing long sticks charged through the capital, setting fire to a mosque of the rival Shiite community, a cinema, petrol pumps and motorbikes. They pelted cars with rocks.
An employee of the city’s Melody cinema, identified as Ghafoor, was sleeping inside when mobs set the movie house on fire. He suffocated to death, doctor Rashid Qureshi of the Polyclinic hospital told AFP.
“He was brought to the hospital dead,” Qureshi told AFP.
Another six people suffered burns, smoke inhalation and cuts sustained when they tried to flee the blazing cinema.
Police fired tear gas and baton-charged the rioters, arresting six and chasing the rest into a forest on the city’s outskirts.
Huge flames roared from the cinema and the Shiite mosque, where rioters had even tried to set a graveyard ablaze. Smoke billowed from a petrol station where mobs had set fire to jerry cans full of petrol.
Around 70 rioters, mainly Islamic school students, had tried to storm the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) headquarters, sending traffic police fleeing on their motorbikes, witnesses said.
A heavy cordon of elite Special Services Group commandoes appeared and blocked the crowd from approaching the ISI as the rioters yelled “Musharraf is a dog, Musharraf is a dog,” in reference to President Pervez Musharraf.
In Tariq’s home town Jhang, a hotbed of sectarian militancy, angry mobs stabbed five Shiites and set their mosque ablaze. Jhang authorities ordered all schools and business to stay closed in a mark of mourning.
Tariq’s killing is the most high-profile in a resurgence of sectarian bloodshed which has seen 76 people killed since February.
