QUETTA Sept 28: Chief of Balochistan National Party (BNP-M) Sardar Akhtar Mengal has announced that his party, in collaboration with other democratic forces, would launch protest campaign if confined political activists were not released.

Speaking to a gathering at a hunger strike camp here on Wednesday, the former chief minister condemned the government for not taking notice of daily token hunger strike which the children of detainee Ali Asghar Bungulzai had been observing for three months.

He said that innocent children of the detainee could not go to their school for study as they were sitting in the strike camp. Sardar Mengal assured the protestors that BNP-M would soon contact other political groups to devise a protest plan against the government’s unlawful acts.

He claimed that hundreds of Baloch nationalist political workers and students had been put behind the bar to force them to give up struggle for their national rights.

The BNP-N leader alleged that the rulers had been looting resources of the province and wanted to suppress voices against the usurpation. He said the government should learn lesson from the past that the Balochs had never surrendered to oppressors.

He demanded that all the detainees should be freed or produced before the courts. He said keeping citizens in detention without lawful requirements was tantamount to violation of their constitutional rights.