QUETTA, Jan 27: A strike was observed here on Tuesday in protest against the assassination of Hazara Democratic Party chairman Hussain Ali Yousufi.

Shops on Alamdar and Toghi roads and in Marriabad and Hazara town areas remained closed, but the HDP strike call received a mixed response in other areas of the city.

Road traffic was thin and government offices and banks remained open.

Frontier corps personnel were deployed in several areas to avert any untoward incident.

Mr Yousufi’s funeral was attended by thousands of mourners, including provincial ministers and local leaders of the PPP, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, Jamhoori Watan Party and Balochistan National Congress. He was buried in the Hazara graveyard.

Activists of the HDP raised slogans against the government and police failure to prevent the killing of Hazara people.

Leaders of political groups criticised law-enforcement agencies and said that no action had been taken against culprits behind the growing incidences of violence against the Hazara community.

Abdul Khaliq Hazara, Ibrahim Hazara and Ghulam Ali of the HDP, Usman Kakar of PkMAP and Dr Hakim Lehri of BNC said that a conspiracy had been hatched to subvert peace and some elements were fanning sectarianism and trying to pit different ethnic groups against each other.

They called for a united struggle to curb the menace that was threatening ethnic and sectarian amity.

They said that some elements were trying to fan sectarian hatred and create a Hangu-and Dera Ismail Khan-like situation in Quetta.

They accused intelligence agencies of supporting a group of religious extremists who were attacking the Hazaras who belonged to the Shia sect. The Persian-speaking Hazaras come from Hazarajat and Bamiyan regions of Afghanistan and they settled in Quetta in the 1880s.

The leaders claimed that nine Hazaras had been killed this month but law-enforcement agencies had not arrested a single killer. Their inaction, they said, was encouraging the culprits and giving them a free hand to subvert the city’s peace.