KARACHI: Abdul Karim has not taken his family to Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s shrine for several years — not because a change of heart but to save his children from the dangers posed by religious extremists.

“My heart still beats with Ghazi Baba,” said Karim, a 40-year-old clerk at the Sindh Secretariat and resident of Kharadar.

“My parents took me for his blessings at my birth and I never missed out on any family occasion to visit the shrine, but for the last five years I haven’t gone there,” he said.

“A few months after I stopped going there the shrine was bombed. I can’t put my children in such dangers.”

The police found the bodies of six young devotees with their throats slit near a shrine in Gulshan-i-Maymar on Tuesday and found a warning note under the hammer indicating a rise in the activity of militants on the fringes of Karachi.

Local authorities echo Karim’s apprehensions saying the number of visitors to the shrines in Karachi is decreasing.

“It is true,” said Ramzan Awan, secretary of the provincial Auqaf department. “The number of visitors to many shrines has declined, especially after the attack on Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s mausoleum.”

Eight people, including two children, were killed when the shrine was attacked by twin suicide bombers on Oct 7, 2010. The incident that left the vast courtyard of the eighth-century saint’s shrine splattered with blood injured dozens others, including some of those who still keep the shoes of visitors for Rs10 a pair.

“I got a wound then, which still hurts in the wintry season like this,” said Hafeez, a man in his 20s.

“Many people avoid visiting shrines as per some reports we have,” said Mr Awan.

Officials, however, said threats to Sufi shrines in Sindh came a year before that attack following the hits on mausoleums of many saints in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab.

Manghopir’s much-revered shrine was among the dozens in the province that had been closed for a day or two in 2009 when the provincial authorities received intelligence reports about possible militant attacks on those buildings.

“The government had declared the shrines as sensitive because of a terrorist threat in 2009,” said a security official. Since then certain shrines have been closed for security threat from time to time. The last time four shrines were closed was in Nov 2012.

The situation in the Manghopir shrine has aggravated to the extent that its famous Sheedi festival has not been held for the last two years and odds are on the wrong side for it this year too.

Manghopir, as the legend goes, was a robber called Mangha Ram, who turned to the faith after an encounter with four 13th century saints — Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Baba Farid Ganjshakar, Bahauddin Zakariya and Hazrat Mehdi or Gor Saheb, the saint of the local Sheedi community.

The crocodiles in the ponds surrounding the shrine are believed to offer good fortune to the visitors while its warm spring is considered to have healing power especially for leprosy patients.

“All these good things were gifted by the four saints to Manghopir,” said Yaqoob Qambrani, chairman of the Pakistan Sheedi Ittehad.

He said the increasing presence of ‘militants’ surrounding the shrine had sowed fear in the native community, forcing them to cancel the festival for two years.

“We go in the weeklong mela (festival) with our families, but because of increasing population of gun-toting people just behind the shrine’s mound we can’t put our children in danger,” he said.

He said the community was mulling over holding the event on a small scale for just a day, but that could not be organised without the government’s help.

“We are trying to meet the culture minister for it,” he added. He said the shrine was still open. However, the number of visitors was much smaller than before because of “the situation here and the security situation in Karachi”.

“Why does the government close shrines instead of wiping out terrorists?” Karim said.