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Army Called Out To Quell Karachi Riots
KARACHI, Jan 28 (News Agencies) - The Pakistani army was called out to quell rioting in the eastern districts of Karachi Sunday following the assassination of five Sunni Muslim clerics, officials and witnesses said.
Armed troops in military vehicles blocked a six-kilometer (four-mile) stretch from the city's international airport to the violence-hit neighborhood of Shah Faisal Colony, they said.
Police said a Sunni party activist died in a drive-by shooting elsewhere in the city late Sunday.
"We have deployed troops in four or five sensitive areas as a precautionary measure," military spokesman Colonel Ashfaq Ahmed said as around 3,000 people gathered outside a mosque to attend the funeral of the slain clerics.
Four were buried under tight police supervision in different graveyards near their homes late Sunday while the family of the fifth asked for the victim be buried in his hometown in northwestern Swabi, police said.
Only close relatives were allowed to attend the funerals because of security forces' fears that miscreants might try to exploit the situation.
Police arrested around 50 people ahead of the rituals as frenzied mobs set fire to two cinemas, a beauty parlor and around 20 vehicles, including two police vans, police and residents said.
They also made an abortive attempt to attack a mosque of the minority Shiite sect.
At least 12 people with bullet wounds were admitted to hospital after an exchange of gunfire between supporters of the Sunni Muslim's Swade Azam party and individuals inside the Shiite mosque, hospital and police officials said.
"We have received about a dozen gunshot cases," doctor Javed Ahmed of the main Jinnah Hospital said.
Witnesses said four people riding on two motorbikes blocked a van carrying students and teachers to Madrassa Jamia Farooqia, an Islamic seminary in the violence-prone city's eastern district.
The assailants, armed with automatic weapons, sprayed bullets at the vehicle when it entered a narrow lane leading to the seminary, they said.
The attackers fled on motorbikes, leaving five people dead, including a senior Sunni scholar, Allama Inayatullah.
"It appears to be a sect-motivated act of terrorism," local administration chief Iqbal Hussain said.
Shops and markets were closed as riot police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of outraged students who blocked the roads by burning tires and pelted buses and trucks with stones.
The head of the religious school, Maulana Salimullah, condemned the killings and advised his followers to remain peaceful.
"It is an act of terrorism. Police and the administration failed to provide security to our madrassas and scholars," Salimullah said.
The Shiite political party, Tehreek-e-Jafria Pakistan (TJP), denied its involvement in the attack.
"We have always condemned terrorist activities. We have nothing to do with today's ambush," provincial TJP president Hasan Turabi said.
"We are investigating the incident on sectarian lines," police chief Jamil said, adding that there was a sudden increase in acts of sectarian violence this month.
The killings came after unidentified gunmen shot dead an Iranian teacher Aga Sultani in Karachi and a Shiite political party leader Anis Hussain Lak, in the central Punjab province last week.
Shiites form about 20% of Sunni-dominated Pakistan's 140 million people.
Hundreds of people have died, mostly in Punjab, in recent years in violence blamed on religious activists from the Sunni and Shiite sects.
Sunday's incident was the worst since a grenade attack on a car of the country's prestigious Binnouri Town seminary here on November 1, 1997, in which three top scholars died.
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