KARACHI: The Ulema Action Committee has given the call for a peaceful strike for Friday to express concern and record their protest over the way Karachi is being devastated by unabated targeted killings despite four months of the ongoing operation in the city.

Karachi Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Qari Muhammad Usman flanked by leaders of JUI-S, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, Sawad-i-Azam, Tanzeem-ul-Ulema, Majlis Khatm-i-Nabuwat, Ansar allama, Ishaat Tauheed-o-Sunnat and others, announced the call for the strike at a press conference in Karachi Press Club on Wednesday.

He said Karachi was the jugular vein and largest city of Pakistan where for the last couple of years, Ulema, students, lawyers and doctors were being killed but their killers remained untraced.

He said there was no precedence in the history of Karachi of such unabated incidents of killing, plundering, kidnapping for ransom, extortions, land grabbing and extra judicial killing of Deobandi Ulema under police custody.

He said religious and political parties had held a number of all-parties conference to draw attention of the present government which was in power for six year, but the government failed to pay any heed to the deteriorating situation of the law and order.

The Ulema were compelled to give the call for a peaceful strike when the government did not move even after the recent tragedy in which Mufti Usman Yar Khan and his colleagues had been brutally killed on the busiest Shahrae Faisal and no government representative attended their funeral prayer.

He demanded that the killers of Ulema, students, lawyers, media men and doctors should be apprehended and hanged and a judicial commission be set up to inquire into the complaints of extra-judicial killings and missing persons. He said the bereaved families of martyred people should be given compensation and a special committee be constituted to investigate the killing of Mufti Usman Yar Khan and killers be arrested.

Qari Usman said the strike call was for Karachi and if their demands were not met, the committee would give a call for the province wide strike in the second phase and also not hesitate to stage a sit-in outside the CM House and the Governor House.

In reply to a question, he said that if the chief minister found himself helpless, it would be better for him to join the protest. In reply to another question, he said if the peaceful strike call turned into violence, the government would be responsible for it.

Answering a question, he said that all parties had backed the decision to launch an operation in Karachi, but the Rangers and police failed to overcome the ongoing lawlessness.

He said the Ulema condemned all incidents of terrorism, including the one of Qayoomabad in which polio vaccinators had been targeted.

It was the responsibility of the government to expose the killers and take them to task, he said.