KARACHI: Warisan-i-Shuhda Committee Shikarpur chairman Maulana Maqsood Ali Domki has appealed to the Sindh government to implement the 22-point agreement it had signed with the committee on Feb 19 as the inordinate delay in its implementation was causing unrest among the people concerned.

Maulana Domki, who is also the central deputy political secretary of the Majlis-i-Wahdatul Muslimeen, said the government and law enforcement agencies had assured them that the entire group involved in the Shikarpur mosque blast would be busted but only four militants were apprehended while the others were yet to be detained.

Maulana Domki, who was accompanied by Maulana Sikander Ali Al-Hussaini, Qamar Deen Shaikh and Syed Basharat Ali, made this demand at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club on Thursday.

He called upon Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah and the law enforcement agencies to immediately arrest militants involved in the Shikarpur blast on Jan 30, 2015 and other incidents of Shia targeted killing in the province as any leniency of the government might prompt other such attacks in the future.

He recalled that the chief minister had assured the committee of providing arms licences to all Shia notables, mosques, imambargahs and shrines to protect themselves against terrorism, but four months had passed, the promised licences had not been issued. He alleged that the seminary which allegedly planned the terrorist attack at the Shikarpur mosque was neither raided nor sealed yet and that seminary was providing logistical support to militants in carrying out their anti-state activities in Sindh and Balochistan.

The MWM leader demanded that the chief minister provide the compensation amount for the dead and injured of the Shikarpur blast announced by him on behalf of Malik Riaz of Bahria Town, saying that the amount had not been received. Maulana Domki recalled that in the terrorism tragedy on Jan 30, 2015 65 persons offering prayers were killed while hundreds others were wounded. Later relatives of the killed and injured people staged a long march from Shikarpur to Karachi on Feb 19 and an agreement was reached but despite four months having passed, the committee constituted to implement the accord had yet to meet.

Maulana Domki said that the director general of Rangers, who also had pledged to visit the Shikarpur imambargah and meet families of the slain, had not yet come to visit.

He said even the repair and reconstruction work of the affected imamabrgah was yet to start. “Despite our meeting with the members of the accord implementation committee, provincial minister for works and services Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani and MPA Syed Nasir Hussain, and they were informed about our apprehensions, but our all demands remained on the back burner.

Published in Dawn, May 29th, 2015

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