Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent | April 11, 2008
THE charred remains of six people were recovered from a locked room in a senior Karachi barrister's office yesterday as an orgy of violence overtook the teeming port city, with pro- and anti-Musharraf mobs fighting running battles in the streets.
Much of Pakistan's business capital, home to 13 million people, was in lockdown as the new Government ordered troops and police on to the streets.
As they did so, the country's lawyers - their bashing of a former Musharraf cabinet minister at the heart of the Karachi mayhem - went on strike and took to the streets to demonstrate against the violence and call for the immediate reinstatement of deposed chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.
The discovery of the charred remains in the barrister's office in Karachi's Tahir Plaza, opposite the city courts, added a new dimension to the crisis, with lawyers horrified by the disclosure that the door to the office was locked from the outside before the building was set alight. The barrister was reported missing following the arson attack, which came after rival groups of pro- and anti-Musharraf lawyers clashed outside the city courts.
The riots were sparked by the bashing in Lahore of President Pervez Musharraf's former parliamentary affairs minister Sher Afghan Niazi and an earlier assault in Karachi on the Chief Minister of Sindh, Arbab Ghulam Rahim.
Mobs of armed "miscreants" locked the main gates to Tahir Plaza and sprayed the building with automatic gunfire before setting fire to it. The building houses the offices of more than 200 lawyers, most of whom fled.
But for those in the barrister's office on the sixth floor, there was no escape since the door was locked from the outside.
The death toll in the Karachi rioting was reported to be 11, with scores more people injured and more than 50 cars and many shops and offices targeted in arson attacks across the city. Officials said they believed the death toll was likely to rise.
The violence left the powerful Pakistan lawyers' movement in disarray and dealt a severe setback to attempts by Benazir Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, to broker a rapprochement between his Pakistan People's Party and the pro-Musharraf Muttahida Quami Movement (United National Movement). The MQM is closely allied to Mr Musharraf and has a stranglehold on Karachi's politics.
Last night, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani made an urgent appeal for calm. Mr Musharraf made a similar appeal before leaving on state visit to China.
In another major development yesterday, a Karachi court quashed criminal proceedings against Mr Zardari over the murder of his brother-in-law, Mir Murtazar Bhutto, who died in a hail of bullets outside the Bhutto family mansion in the posh suburb of Clifton in 1996.