ern's: Karachi gang war prompts intervention by Pakistan Rangers

Interior ministry troops go into gangster-run areas to end violence which has claimed at least 1,000 lives this year

Weeks of violent mayhem that have left more than 1,000 dead in Pakistan's biggest city culminated on Sunday in troops entering a gangster-run district in an attempt to end the violence.

The holy month of Ramadan, supposedly a time of piety, has only increased the slaughter on Karachi's streets, with beheadings and horrifically mutilated bodies dumped in sacks in gutters, the debris from a war between gangs divided on ethnic lines.

Over the weekend, the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, described the violence in Karachi as the country's "greatest challenge".

In an extraordinary televised press conference on Sunday, a senior official of the ruling Pakistan Peoples party accused the interior minister, Rehman Malik, also of the same party, of culpability in the killings in Karachi.

Zulfiqar Mirza, the senior PPP provincial minister, claimed he had proof that Malik was "hand in glove with the killers".

The gang turf war is also a political and financial struggle, about the control of extortion rackets in Karachi known as bata, with three mainstream political parties all drawing support from different ethnic groups and each having a criminal underworld following in the city.

The bloodshed has essentially pitted a gang associated with the Pakistan Peoples party of President Asif Zardari against thugs linked to the Muttihida Quami Movement (MQM), headed by Altaf Hussain, who lives in exile in London. The MQM has long dominated Karachi but it is being challenged by the PPP and the third main player, the Awami National party (ANP), which represents the huge ethnic Pashtun population of the city, originally from north-west Pakistan. The MQM's base is provided by the Mohajirs, an ethnic grouping which emigrated from northern India during partition.

British diplomats have been active behind the scenes, pressuring all sides to quell the violence, which is crippling Pakistan's economic heart.

The MQM, the ANP and Karachi's business community have in recent days called for the army to intervene, with at least 1,000 people falling prey to the tit-for-tat killings in the city since the start of the year ? easily eclipsing the violence by religious extremists across the rest of the country.

However, the PPP is resisting, fearing that deployment of the army could eventually topple its three-year-old government and Pakistan's latest, western-backed, experiment with democracy. The paramilitary units deployed, the Rangers, come under civilian control.

Paramilitary forces found torture chambers and arms caches during raids in the Lyari district on Sunday. One dank basement shown to journalists contained a chair, with handcuffs and padlocks attached. Two earlier attempts to enter Lyari failed. Lyari is the stronghold of the PPP.

The gangs usually fail to capture rival gang members, taking out their anger instead on anyone from the opposite ethnic group, with many victims innocent bystanders abducted or killed.

The gangs have added to the public torment by taping the torture sessions and posting them on YouTube, and passing them on from phone to phone.

Some of the corpses turning up in sacks have notes pinned to them saying: "Do you want war or peace?" and "Have you had enough or do you want more?"

"This is a battle between maniacs. They have no moral values," said a senior Karachi police officer, Naeem Ahmed Shaikh. "We have received tortured bodies from many areas of Karachi."

Another senior security official in Karachi said: "The MQM doesn't want to share the cake. But the others want their slice."

Saeed Shah

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