KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain has called upon the army chief to take notice of the alleged violation of army’s code of conduct by the director general of Sindh Rangers and other officials and urged him to do justice in the matter.

“Are Rangers a security force or a political party? Does the code of conduct of the armed forces allow the army, its paramilitary forces like Rangers, etc, to issue a charge-sheet against a political party,” Mr Hussain asked while addressing from London a convention of party workers here on Sunday.

“We are not against the army; we are against the rotten eggs in the institution... Chief of the Army Staff General Raheel Sharif should save Pakistan and throw out the rotten eggs who have embezzled billions of rupees like civilians,” he said.

The speech was apparently in response to media reports that quoted Rangers sources as saying the paramilitary force was going to release a factsheet in a couple of days about the March 11 raid on MQM’s Nine Zero headquarters in Azizabad.

Mohammad Anwar removed from MQM’s coordination committee

Mr Hussain lashed out at Rangers DG Major General Bilal Akbar and his subordinates for “committing atrocities against Mohajirs, and illegal arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings of MQM workers”.

He spoke at length about the March 11 Rangers raid on the MQM headquarters and claimed that no wanted person had been arrested there. He said it was alleged that weapons stolen from Nato containers had been recovered during the raid, but this was not mentioned in the FIRs registered against 26 MQM workers.

He claimed that the weapons seized belonged to MQM’s parliamentarians and were licensed and said that even Rangers had admitted that “90 per cent of the weapons recovered from Nine Zero were legal”. But, he added, the paramilitary force had not returned the licensed weapons to the MQM parliamentarians.

He alleged that MQM worker Waqas Shah had been killed by Rangers but they arrested another Muttahida worker and were now planning to get the man convicted.

“The Rangers presented before media the picture of Nooruddin Subhani, a cook of the Khurshid Begum Secretariat, as a wanted terrorist and target killer arrested from Nine Zero on March 11, but they silently released him without offering any apology when they came to know about him.”

Speaking about various incidents of “extrajudicial killings” of MQM workers, Mr Hussain said that it was because of his teachings that people were still demonstrating patience. “The city will turn into a Somalia if I am no more.”

He appealed to the army chief to take action against those who were committing injustices to innocent citizens.

The MQM chief also accused Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan of “supporting injustices against the people of Karachi”.

K-Electric warned

Mr Hussain asked the K-Electric management to end the menace of loadshedding and improve the power distribution system in a day or two. “If you cannot do this, shift your office from Karachi. Otherwise, the people of the city will remove your office on their own,” he warned.

He said the MQM would soon hold a demonstration against the power utility.

Leader removed

Senior London-based MQM leader Mohammad Anwar was removed on Sunday from the party’s coordination committee because of “his deteriorating health”.

According to an MQM press release, Mr Anwar was not taking interest in the party’s affairs for quite some time as he had to visit doctors for his treatment.

“The coordination committee has decided that Mr Anwar be discharged from all his organisational responsibilities, including as a member of the coordination committee, so that he could take rest and rejoin the party after his full recovery,” it said, adding that since he was no longer a member of the coordination committee, workers should not contact him regarding the party’s organisational affairs.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2015

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