LONDON, May 13: The British media on Sunday extensively covered Saturday’s carnage in Karachi with The Sunday Telegraph reporting that gunmen on motorcycles were pumping bullets into crowds demonstrating against Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, while police stood by and watched.

The report said the ensuing challenge by lawyers and opposition parties to Gen Musharraf's eight-year rule had left the president -- a key Western ally in the "war on terror" -- desperately clinging to power.

“Many of the 15,000 police and security forces deployed in the city stood idly by as armed activists from Karachi's ruling party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a coalition ally of Gen Musharraf, blocked Mr (Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad) Chaudhry's exit from the airport and took control of the city's central district.

“The movement's leader, Altaf Hussain -- who lives in self-imposed exile in London -- co-ordinated opposition to Mr Chaudhry's arrival and addressed crowds gathered on the streets of Karachi in a mobile phone call relayed by loudspeakers.

“He called on supporters to be peaceful but to show whose city it was. Instead, violence reigned,” the ST report said.

Accusing Altaf Hussain directly, the ST report further said exacerbating the political furore in Karachi over the sacking of Mr Chaudhry “is a decades-old and simmering feud between the MQM, a movement supported by the city's mohajir population who migrated from India at Partition in 1947, and ethnic Pathans, the movement's autocratic leader, via telephone, from Edgware in north London.”

According to the Sunday Observer, witnesses described MQM supporters calling for ammunition and firing from buildings, reportedly at supporters of the Pakistan's People's Party and Jamaat-i-Islami while opposition supporters were firing back.

The report quoted Arshad Zubairi, chief executive of the private TV network Aaj, saying that its building elsewhere in the city had been fired on by MQM supporters who wanted them to stop airing live footage of the unrest.

The government's failure to contain the unrest in Karachi, despite the presence of 15,000 security forces, will deepen the political turmoil gripping Pakistan, the SO said. In a related story, Sunday Telegraph’s Colin Freeman (Key ally is a Key liability) said Pakistan is both a key ally and a key liability in the West's war on terror.

Mr Freeman said were Pakistan to slide into major instability, the effects would be dire.

“It has not only 130 million people -- more than Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq combined -- but also southern Asia's largest army and a stockpile of nuclear weapons. It could make Iraq seem like a minor problem,” feared Freeman.

The Sunday Times also ran an interview of Nawaz Sharif, in which the former prime minister is quoted as saying that he feared (Benazir) Bhutto – regarded as the country’s most charismatic politician – may be planning to trade her opposition to the military ruler for a chance to return to office.