ISLAMABAD, April 9: Fresh tensions over Karachi violence and other incidents are likely to mar Thursday’s opening of the first regular session of the new National Assembly called to put some balm on previous wounds.

Political rivals are expected to fling allegations and counter-allegations at each other when the session begins at 10am, in sharp contrast to strong signals of political reconciliation that marked the special sittings held last month to mark the birth of the lower house and the new government of President Pervez Musharraf’s opponents.

It will be the turn of the president’s loyalists to sit on the opposition benches after enjoying the fruits of power with him for five years and confront the new ruling coalition of those who were at the receiving end for more than eight-and-a-half years that he had been at the helm with a military-led regime.

The government of Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani has planned to use the session in a political healing process by having one resolution passed to seek a UN investigation into the Dec 27 assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto and another to offer an apology to the people of Pakistan for what his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) calls the ‘judicial murder’ of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the form of his 1979 execution after a controversial conspiracy-to-murder conviction.

The session is also likely to take first parliamentary steps towards healing the wounds of the Nov 3, 2007, massacre of superior judiciary committed by the sacking of about 60 judges of the Supreme Court and four high courts under a controversial emergency imposed by the president in his now-abandoned capacity as the army chief.

But latest indications were that things would not be as smooth as when Mr Gilani won an unprecedented unanimous vote of confidence from the house on March 29 and before when the opposition posed only token challenges to his election as leader of the house and of his party nominees’ election as speaker and the deputy speaker.

The new opposition, already spitting fire over the roughing up of former Sindh province chief minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim in Karachi on Monday and of former parliamentary affairs minister Sher Afgan Niazi in Lahore on Tuesday, is likely to protest and point fingers at parties of the ruling coalition and lawyers agitating for the restoration of the pre-Nov 3 judiciary.

The coalition parties, including the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), are expected to blame what they see as the remnants of a dying regime still holding strings of power for these incidents as well as Wednesday’s deadly clashes in Karachi.