‘Daesh Pakistan’ on victim’s suit; 5 policemen killed – Karachi turned into rubbish bin

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MULTAN, Pakistan, March 5, (Agencies): Pakistani police have found body of a man in the central city of Multan with chained feet, tied hands, and wearing a Guantanamostyle orange jumpsuit. Police officer Gul Mohammad said Saturday that the body found near a state-owned television station with gunshot wounds to the head. The body was identified as that of Azhar Jilani, who was abducted in June 2014. A message reading “Daesh Pakistan” was scrawled on the back of the victim’s jumpsuit — using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. The message accused the victim of being an “agent.” Pakistani officials and politicians have mostly depicted IS presence in the country as negligible, but the group has repeatedly claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks including one at a Sufishrine last month that killed 88 people.

Karachi turned into rubbish bin
Neighbours forced their way into Mohammad Umair’s home battling smoke and flames in a desperate bid to rescue his young family — he and his wife survived, their children did not. The fire began in a heap of garbage which blocked the narrow alley outside the five-storey building and quickly spread inside, engulfing the family as they slept that night.

The tragic case has angered citizens of Karachi already frustrated by a failing waste management system, who are calling for more to be done. Umair, a 31-year-old cloth merchant, breaks down as he explains that two of his children died before they even reached the hospital. “The third one, Abdul Aziz, died while the doctors were trying to save his life,” Umair adds, recalling the cluster of doctors working frantically but futilely around the tiny body of his infant son.

Police have yet to find out what caused the rubbish to catch fire but it spread quickly to their first fl oor apartment, filling the lone bedroom they shared where the family were all sleeping together. Umair’s wife Shameen blames the city and its citizens for her children’s deaths. “Those who dump trash and those who do not fulfil their duties to clean up are responsible,” she says fl atly, eyes dry as she stands with her husband among the cinders of their former home. “Who else?” Shameen is perhaps the most tragic figure to point fingers at waste management authorities accused of corruption and ineptitude, but she is not the first or the only one. Karachi, whose mayor is Waseem Akhtar, a megacity of towering high rises and sprawling illegal settlements on the Arabian Sea, saw its growth explode in recent decades after waves of migration, largely refugees fl eeing the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas.

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