ISLAMABAD, April 14: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) on Friday held Jamaat-i-Islami responsible for the Nishtar Park blast and asked the government to declare the party a ‘terrorist organization’ and ban it.

“If President General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz want to stop incidents of suicide bombing and other acts of terrorism in the country they should immediately ban the JI which is patronising and producing suicide attackers,” said MQM MNAs at a press conference at the Parliament House cafeteria.

The MQM legislators who spoke to reporters were Kunwar Khalid Younus, Abid Ali Umang, Iqbal Mohammad Ali, Abdul Wasim, Shamim Akhtar, Shabina Talat and Afsar Jahan.

Mr Younus rejected the allegation of security lapse and said it had been proved that the attack was the work of a suicide bomber. He said the Sindh government officials and provincial interior minister had given clearance to organisers for holding the congregation after the bomb disposal squad had conducted a thorough search of the park and the stage.

He said the bomb disposal squad had confirmed that the explosive used in Tuesday’s blast was of the same type which had earlier been used in attacks on Haidri Mosque and Imam Bargah Ali Raza in Karachi.

Mr Younus wondered at JI chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s insistence that the Nishtar Park blast had been caused by a remote control device.

“If Qazi sahib knows it was a remote control bomb then he must tell the nation who was holding the remote control at the time of the blast,” he said.

He said the JI had been wrongly implicating the MQM in the incident. He said that in the past several people had been arrested from the houses of JI leaders while planning to carry out suicide attacks in different parts of the country.

“The JI has never condemned suicide attacks,” he pointed out.

Referring to the demand of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) that the Sindh government should be sacked, Mr Younus said that first the MMA should resign from governments in the NWFP and Balochistan due to the poor law and order situation there. He said the entire nation knew that foreign terrorists had taken refuge in the NWFP and attacks on gas pipelines had become a routine in Balochistan.

Similarly, he added, the MMA government in the NWFP should have resigned after the Hangu incident in which dozens of people had been killed and injured in an attack on a Muharram procession.