KARACHI: The Inspector-General (IG) of Sindh Police Mushtaq Shah on Thursday said that the operation against criminal elements in Karachi’s troubled Lyari Town will be completed within one to two days, DawnNews reported.

Briefing media representatives at the Central Police office in Karachi, Shah said that the security forces had achieved significant progress in the operation. He said that police had managed to set up check posts in Lyari’s Afshani Gali, while they had also been able to enter the hostile Sangu Lane area – areas which previously had almost no police presence.

Reiterating the possibility of Taliban militants in Lyari, the IG Sindh assured that the operation would be completed in “a day or two”.

Furthermore, Shah informed reporters that five police personnel had lost their lives in the operation while an additional ten had been wounded during the past seven days.

However, Chief Minister Sindh Qaim Ali Shah had refrained from giving a time-frame for an end to the operation earlier on Wednesday, stating that it would “take time to root out (the) criminal elements.”

A strong contingent of police, the Frontier Constabulary and the Crime Investigation Department’s Anti-extremists Cell had launched the ‘Grand Operation’ in the early hours of Friday (April 27) amid a high degree of tension caused by the April 26 killing of a key leader of the PPP’s local chapter in the area.

The locality remained tense and continued to portray the image of a battlefield as the operation entered its seventh day on Thursday, with reports of at least eight people having been killed and 41 others being wounded during the past 24 hours.