01 March 2005	Tuesday	19 Muharram 1426

QUETTA, Feb 28: Women and children of the Marri tribe staged a demonstration here on Monday in protest against what they called humiliation of women by police personnel during a search for weapons in the Marri camp.

The demonstrators were holding placards and banners inscribed with slogans condemning the police action and alleging that women were tortured and humiliated during the drama of search and seizure of weapons.

Most of the women were crying while they spoke about the ordeal they had to face. They alleged that they had been lined up and kept outside their homes for several hours in the cold and rainy night of the raid. Khair Bibi, Bora Khatoon, Bibi Zainab, and Zeba Bibi accused police of violating sanctity of their homes which they searched without fulfilling legal procedure.

They rejected the police claim of having seized arms and ammunitions from their homes and said that the Marri tribe in Quetta consisted of poor people who could not afford to keep weapons, particularly when they knew that the government was against them.

They urged human rights organizations and political parties to condemn what they called anti-Baloch policies of the government and harassment of Marri tribesmen of the provincial capital.

Meanwhile lawyers belonging to different political parties have strongly criticized the raid on the Marri camp and described it as an attempt to malign the nationalist leader, Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri.