KARACHI: In what appears to be a cautious and to some extent mild reaction to Dr Zulfikar Mirza’s yet another diatribe against the Muttahida Qaumi Movement on Sunday, the party’s coordination committee strongly condemned what it called “inflammatory, malicious and bogus allegations” leveled by him and urged the president and the PPP leadership to clarify their position.

Soon after Dr Mirza ended his press conference, the coordination committee held an emergency meeting, simultaneously in Karachi and London, to decide how the party would react.

Sources told Dawn that the committee reviewed the situation and there was a dominant view that Dr Mirza’s press conference was more damaging for the PPP than for the MQM.

They said senior PPP leaders had contacted the MQM and made it clear that whatever Dr Mirza had said was not the party’s policy but his own views.

However, some members of the committee were furious because of Dr Mirza’s attack on MQM chief Altaf Hussain and proposed that all contacts with the PPP leadership should be cut off since they believed that he expressed the views of his leadership.

But a majority in the committee was of the view that Dr Mirza was against PPP-MQM reconciliation and he had held the press conference in order to prevent the MQM from returning to the coalition government.

The committee decided to issue a cautious statement to condemn only Dr Mirza and not the PPP.

The statement said Dr Mirza had always worked on an agenda of creating hatred among permanent citizens of Sindh and “today he also tried to fan hatred and violence”.

Such allegations, it said, had always been levelled against the MQM but had never been proved.

It alleged that Dr Mirza himself was a patron of criminal elements who were involved in terrorism, kidnapping for ransom and murders. “It is Dr Mirza who was aiding and abetting killers, terrorists, kidnappers, dacoits and other criminals involved in heinous offences and it was because of his patronage of the killers, terrorists, extortionists and kidnappers that he kept silent when the Rangers carried out operation in several parts of Karachi but when the Rangers moved against criminal elements in Lyari, Dr Mirza started criticising Rehman Malik who was overseeing the operation, thereby amply demonstrating that he was directly involved in the bloodbath in Karachi.”

It said the action initiated against killers, terrorists, kidnappers and criminals must go on for restoring permanent peace in Karachi.

The MQM urged the PPP leadership to take immediate notice of the allegations leveled by Dr Mirza and explain their position.

The coordination committee also urged people not to get provoked by Dr Mirza’s ‘inflammatory and unfounded’ allegations.