About 100 Sunni Muslims rioted in the city’s eastern Malir neighbourhood after the funeral of a Sunni man who was killed in a shootout with Shiites last night, said police officer Wasim Akbar Baluch. They set fire to several small shops and threw stones at police, who used tear gas and fired guns in the air to control the crowd, Baluch said.
Otherwise, Pakistan’s largest city was tense but quiet. Most shops and businesses were closed, and there was little traffic on the streets.
The hardline opposition Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance called for the shutdown in response to the kidnapping and killing of one of its leaders on Monday, as well as a suicide attack on a Shiite mosque and a riot in which a KFC restaurant was set on fire.
“The public has given full support to the strike against terrorism. Business in the city is closed,” said Merajul Huda, the Karachi chief of Jamaat-e-Islami, a key party in the alliance.
Karachi Police Chief Tariq Jamil said that except for “one or two” places in the city – where protesters pelted passing cars with stones – today’s strike was peaceful.
He said 56 people have been arrested for arson attacks and violence in the city in the past two days, raising fears of escalating violence between minority Shiites and Sunnis – a recurring problem in this Islamic country in recent years.
Many businessmen supported the strike. Others opposed it, saying it was bad for business. But they felt they had little choice but to comply, fearing rioters would target their property.
Karachi, Pakistan’s main commercial centre, has been tense since Monday, when the bombing and gunbattles at the Shiite mosque left five people dead. Six others died at a KFC restaurant when a mob, angered over the mosque attack, burned it.
Also on Monday, gunmen abducted a former Jamaat-e-Islami politician, Aslam Mujahid. Hours later, police found Mujahid’s body, riddled with bullets.
It wasn’t clear whether the killing was linked to the other violence. Huda blamed an influential political group, the Mutahida Qami Movement, for killing Mujahid.
The Karachi police chief investigator, Manzoor Mughal, said three suspected mosque attackers were from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi – an outlawed Sunni militant group. Only one of the attackers survived, and he is currently recovering from injuries at a Karachi navy hospital, officials said.
A Karachi anti-terrorism court today gave police until June 8 to interrogate the suspect, identified as Tehseen, 26, said a government prosecutor, Habib Ahmed.
According to Mughal, Tehseen told interrogators that a Lashkar-e-Jhangvi chief, Asif Chotto, drove the three attackers in a van and dropped them near the mosque before the attack.
The Karachi attack followed a suicide bombing at a Shiite gathering at a shrine in the capital Islamabad on Friday that left about 20 dead.