Opposition members staged a walkout in the National Assembly to protest against the attack on the residence of Iftikhar Chaudhry's counsel Munir A. Malik on Thursday.

Unknown assailants sprayed bullets on the residence of Malik, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, around 3 am.

They accused the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of creating hostile conditions by planning a counter rally in Karachi to weaken the public reception on May 12 there.

Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly and MMA secretary general Maulana Fazul Rehman said Gen Pervez Musharraf was deliberately trying to create an-emergency like situation.

Parliamentary affairs minister Dr Sher Afgan endorsed the opposition's concern and said the announcement of rival public rallies on the same day could lead to violent clashes.

The main defence attorney of the suspended chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Tariq Mahmud, rejected the Sindh government's advice to defer Justice Iftikhar’s May 12 trip to Karachi in view of the parallel rally by MQM.

Meanwhile, lawyers in Karachi, Lahore and other major cities boycotted courts and staged demonstrations to protest the attack.

Former premier Zafrullah Khan Jamali urged the government to drop its plans to hold public rallies in Islamabad and other towns. He said such a policy could lead to civil strife.

In Karachi, MQM leader Farooq Sattar said their rally would pass through the main city roads and culminate at the mausoleum of Quaide Azam Jinnah.

There, MQM chief Altaf Hussain would address the meeting through telephone.

Sattar said the MQM supported the independence of judiciary but would not allow the opposition and other vested interests to destablise the present government.

Addressing the National Assembly, the leader of Opposition said the government was responsible for the present judicial crisis.

He said a state within a state was being created around the Parliament House by gathering its people on the occasion of presidential address on May 12 while obstacles were being created for the opposition parties.

He alleged that the road connecting NWFP to Punjab at Attock was blocked many times to prevent the people of that province from joining the demonstrations in Islamabad.

Islamabad, May 10
Pakistan is preparing its next generation nuclear-capable ballistic missiles for deployment, which will give it the ability to target facilities across most if not all of India, an organisation of American scientists has said.

A report by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which includes a satellite image taken on June 5, 2005, of Pakistan’s facilities showed a 15 Transporter Erector Launchers (TEL) for the medium-range Shaheen II being fitted at the National Defence Complex, near Fatehjang, 30 km southwest of Islamabad.

Authors of the report carried by local daily Dawn here today said that they discovered the vehicles while preparing for the latest nuclear notebook on Pakistani nuclear forces published in the May/June issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

According to the report, at Pakistan’s National Defence Complex the main facilities are spread over a 6x2 km area on a ridge and include what appear to be administrative buildings, missile assembly halls and garages.

At two locations, several large six-axle vehicles are clearly visible on the satellite image, as are several smaller four-axle vehicles.

Approximately 1.5 km northwest from the main building is a cluster of what appears to be five recently constructed garages.

Parked in front or partially inside the two largest garages to the west are 11 vehicles that, the authors claim, show the characteristic six-axle design of the Shaheen II TEL, indicating that the launcher itself has not yet been installed.

The authors estimate that Pakistan has an arsenal of about 60 nuclear weapons.

In the past five and a half years, Pakistan has deployed two new nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, entered the final development stages of a potentially nuclear-capable cruise missile, started construction of a new plutonium production reactor and is close to completing a second chemical separation facility. — PTI

Toronto, May 10
The tragic Kanishka bombing killing 329 persons in 1985 could have been averted had the Air India plane not been allowed to leave Canada before a bomb-sniffing dog could search the luggage, a former police officer has told a probe commission looking into terror attack.

The Air India flight 182, which exploded off the Irish coast, was not alerted of the bomb threat and allowed to leave Canada before a bomb-sniffing dog could search the plane and its luggage, Serge Carignan, a former dog handler with Quebec’s provincial police, submitted yesterday before the inquiry commission presided over by Justice John Major.

Carignan believed he could have found the explosives but the plane had already left the Montreal airport by the time he arrived to check it.

Carignan testified in Ottawa that he was called to Mirabel airport on June 22, 1985, hours before a bomb blew up the plane.

He said he was told officials needed help searching a plane and luggage and that the airport’s regular Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) dog squad was out of the region on that date. “By the time I arrived at the airport, roughly 45 minutes later, the plane had already taken off,” Carignan said.

The former dog handler discounted official reports from RCMP and Transport Canada that were provided during earlier Bob Rae probe into the disaster. The reports said bomb-sniffing dogs checked Air India flights before they left Toronto and Montreal.

Liberal Member of Parliament Ujjal Dosanjh said the contradictions with the RCMP and Transport Canada reports werealarming. — PTI

Dhaka, May 10
Virtually confining former Prime Ministers Khaleda Zia and her arch-rival Sheikh Hasina to their houses, authorities in emergency-ruled Bangladesh have put restrictions on people, specially leaders from their political parties, from visiting them.

Security officials tightened restrictions on visitors only allowing a handful of close relatives and some senior party leaders to see Hasina at her Sudha Sadan residence, while Zia was allowed to meet only one relative in the past four days at her residence inside Dhaka cantonment, the Daily Star and other newspapers reported.

Regardless of the “restriction” on her movement, Hasina stepped out in public yesterday morning for the first time since her homecoming two days ago to see the body of a leader of her Awami League at a city hospital.

But Dhaka’s DCP Selim Mohammad Jahangir denied imposition of any bar. — PTI