15 April 2005	Friday	04 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1426

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LAHORE, April 14: The Punjab government used all available resources and tactics on Thursday to make the PPP plan to welcome Asif Ali Zardari a failure. Most of the inter-city public road transport to the provincial capital has been blocked for Friday (today), official sources said. “I tried in vain to catch a bus for Lahore for the entire day on Thursday to see my ailing sister,” said advocate Salman Chaudhry while talking to Dawn by phone from Sargodha.

He claimed all transport for Lahore had been suspended. “We have been warned of a strict action if we ply our vehicles for Lahore on Friday,” he quoted the manager of a bus service at a terminal in his city.

The reports said every vehicle entering Lahore was being searched by personnel from police and other law enforcement agencies at entry points. Any passenger suspected to be a PPP activist was being off loaded and sent back, it was learnt.

On the other hand, all PPP offices in the province were sealed while crackdown for the arrest of ‘miscreants’ continued relentlessly.

A list compiled at the ‘control rooms’ set up by the government suggested that at least 400 activists and leaders had been detained in Lahore alone, while the figure was around 500 in rest of the cities in the Punjab.

All activists who had any case registered against their names in the past had been declared wanted by the police.

Punjab PPP information secretary Naveed Chaudhry said that a police team raided his house and ransacked a party office set up there. He alleged the police tortured one of his employees in a bid to know his whereabouts.

Ghulam Rasool, a party activist from Samanabad, said the police ransacked his bakery in his absence and thrashed his son Tariq Rasool.

Besides, all the camps set up by the PPP in the city and elsewhere in the province to gather support for the rally to welcome Mr Zardari were uprooted. “We set up four such camps around the Lahore airport on Thursday but the police ransacked them all,” Mr Chaudhry said.

All the activists detained by the police were kept at various lock-ups. No fresh cases were registered against them till Thursday night.