– File Photo

KARACHI: While millions of revellers across the globe celebrated the New Year amid glittering fireworks and fanfare, the gun-infested city of Karachi witnessed bloodshed as three people were killed and scores wounded in what was described as “celebratory gunfire”.

The year 2012 began in Karachi with the deaths of three people and over 50 getting wounded in incidents of firing into the air across the city, hospital sources said.

Many of the people who received gunshot wounds were taken to private hospitals for treatment rather than government hospitals, police said.

The heavy firing witnessed across the city on the New Year’s Eve also posed a serious question to the so-called ‘targeted operations’ carried out by Rangers and police in different parts of the city during which they claimed to have seized huge numbers of weapons.

Despite the official announcement that Section 144 (power to issue order absolute at once in urgent cases of nuisance or apprehended danger) of the criminal procedure code had been imposed in the city under which firing into the air, use of fireworks and riding motorcycles without silencers had been banned on the New Year’s Eve, the city reverberated with the sound of heavy gunfire and deafening noise of motorbikes running on streets without silencers.

Police surgeon Dr Hamid Parhair told Dawn that three bodies bearing gunshot wounds were brought to hospitals — two to the Civil Hospital Karachi and one to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre — after midnight.

The three victims had suffered gunshot wounds said to be during “celebratory fire”, Dr Parhair quoted the police as saying.

Similarly, medico-legal sections reported that 20 gunshot wound victims were brought to the CHK, 15 to the JPMC and 14 to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Dr Parhair added.

There were an equal number of wounded people who had come to the three government hospitals for gunshot treatment, but refused the ML report, the senior doctor said.

Likewise, a significant number of the gunshot victims were taken to private hospitals for treatment.

“We witness the same situation every year at the New Year’s Eve as scores of wounded and dead are brought to hospitals because of incidents of firing into the air,” the senior doctor remarked.

Another issue which arises on the New Year’s Eve every year in Karachi is the arrival of a large number of people at the seafront that creates a law and order situation.

Authorities face up the situation by deploying heavy police force and placing barriers on roads leading to the seafront to control hooliganism along the beach.

Despite these arrangements, a large number of young people determined to go to the seafront manages to reach there.

Local residents of the area have said that the rowdy crowd, barriers and restrictions have become a serious problem for them on New Year’s Eve.