Karachi, August 24
With no let-up in violence in Pakistan’s commercial hub, security forces today launched a massive search operation to flush out terrorists, gangsters and other anti-social elements from the city, arresting criminals and recovering weapons from the affected areas.

The paramilitary Rangers that carried out operations in different parts of the city arrested 14 suspected criminals and also recovered a huge cache of arms 
and ammunition.

Calling it a ‘surgical operation’, heavily-armed paramilitary forces and the police conducted house-to-house searches to roundup terrorists, target killers and kidnappers.

Brig Wasim Ayub said at a press briefing today that 14 arrests had been made and a large quantity of arms, ammunition, chemicals, explosive devices, extortion notes, mobile phones, heroin and charas recovered.

He did not elaborate on what kind of chemicals were seized but said they were used to make weapons. “There is no political pressure on us to spare anyone or ignore any troubled area. We are carrying out the operations and raids on intelligence reports,” the Brigadier said.

The police and Rangers got into action after the provincial government came under increasing pressure to call in the Army to control the political-ethnic violence that has left over 500 persons dead since early July.

While some 325 persons were killed in the violence in July, the figure is 205 in August with around 100 persons killed and 100 wounded in the last week itself.

Interestingly, no operation could be carried out in the crime-infested Lyari slum after residents came out and protested last night when the Rangers and police reached the spot to conduct raids.

The raids were not carried out after a shooting incident during the protests in which six people were injured.

The security forces comprising the Rangers fanned out into the worst-hit Lyari, Orangi Town, Malir, Gulshin-e-Iqbal, Ahsan Abad, Saddar and some other parts of the city, which had witnessed spate of incidents of firing during the past week.

The forces moved in after cordoning off the areas and blocking traffic movement.

The Mutthaida Qaumi Movement which is the biggest stakeholder in the city with the highest number of seats in the national and provincial Assemblies from here has alleged that criminals and separatists from Balochistan were operating out of Lyari with impunity and were involved in the violence, killings and extortion rackets with the support of some ministers in the Pakistan Peoples Party-led government.

The MQM says the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs who migrated from India at the time of partition were being targeted by the killers and criminals on basis of their ethnicity. — PTI