May 22, 2007	Tuesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 05, 1428

KARACHI, May 21: Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain has directed all Haq Parast elected representatives to launch a mass contact campaign to inform the people about ‘conspiracies being hatched by miscreants to destroy the peace of Sindh, particularly Karachi’.

Speaking to the members of the MQM coordination committee and Haq Parast elected representatives at the party’s international secretariat in London on Monday, he said some ‘anti-state’ elements were trying to create misunderstanding between the poor and middle-class people of different ethnicities in Karachi to stop them from waging a joint struggle for the elimination of the feudal system.

Mr Hussain asked Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad, who met him in London, to launch a high-level independent inquiry into the May 12 tragedy to ascertain who was responsible for the bloodshed.

According to a press release, the MQM chief rejected an allegation levelled by the Sindh home department that the MQM had blocked the roads by parking tankers on May 12.

He alleged that the bloodshed on May 12 was an outcome of a conspiracy hatched by all opposition parties.

Meanwhile, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s Pakhtoon-Punjabi Organising Committee (PPOC) has alleged that the chief of Awami National Party Asfandyar Wali and his supporters were behind a conspiracy to engineer ethnic riots in Karachi.

In a statement issued here on Monday, PPOC chief Muhammad Sardar Khan and other members said that 25 people were killed in a bomb blast in Peshawar and 35 were killed in another blast in Charsadda, but the ANP chief did not bother to visit the houses of those victims to offer condolences.

“ANP neither demands the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) government to quit nor gives a strike call against acts of terrorism.”

PPOC cautioned people of all ethnic groups, in particular the Pakhtoon community, about the conspiracy and urged them to maintain peace and order.