Army chief seeks support for peaceful polls: 81,000 troops deployed
By Our Reporter
ISLAMABAD, Feb 15: Chief of Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has expressed satisfaction over the pace and manner of army’s deployment for maintaining law and order during the elections.
Presiding over a high-level meeting held at the General Headquarters on Friday to review the deployment, he reiterated the need for holding peaceful elections and called upon all segments of the society to help the army and other law-enforcement agencies in maintaining law and order.
He expressed his confidence that the nation would unite for a stable and peaceful Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Inter Services Public Relations Director General Maj-Gen Athar Abbas told Dawn that 81,000 troops had been deployed outside 8,923 ‘most sensitive’ polling stations. Among them, 34,000 are army personnel and 47,000 of Rangers, Frontier Corps and Frontier Constabulary.
He said that 95 battalions had been deployed in Punjab where 3,787 of the 37,636 polling stations had been marked as ‘most sensitive.’
In Sindh, where 1,575 of the 13,405 polling stations have been declared ‘most sensitive’, 27 battalions have been deployed.
Fifteen battalions have been deployed for 1,350 of the 3,457 polling stations in Balochistan.
In the NWFP and Fata, where 1,094 of the 8,173 polling stations have been declared sensitive, 12 battalions have been deployed. In Fata, all the 1,122 polling stations have been declared most sensitive. The number of troops in a battalion varies between 500 and 600.
Twenty of the 382 polling stations in two constituencies in the federal capital have been declared as sensitive and none of them most sensitive.
