QUETTA, March 1: Pakistan Workers’ Party (PWP) chairman Nasrullah Khan Kakar was killed in Bostan near here on Wednesday. The alleged assailant also was killed in an exchange of fire with Mr Kakar’s security guard, police said, adding that he was a relative of the deceased.

According to sources, Mr Kakar was on his way to the provincial capital from his native town Bostan in his vehicle with a security guard and two sons when the alleged assailant, Abdul Ghani Panezai, blocked the vehicle.

During an altercation that followed, Mr Panezai opened fire with an automatic weapon, killing the PWP chairman. Mr Kakar’s security guard Abdul Nabi returned fire and injured the assailant.

Levies reached the place after the incident and sent the body and the injured man to Civil Hospital, Quetta, where the latter succumbed to his injuries.

Immediately after the incident, hundreds of PWP’s supporters blocked the Jinnah Road near the hospital and hurled stones on vehicles. They chanted slogans against the Pishin administration and nationalists and demanded arrest of the killers. Markets and business establishments were closed during the protest.

Addressing a press conference, the party’s vice-president Syed Salahuddin Agha termed the killing a ‘political terrorist murder’ and said the terrorists had also killed Abdul Khaliq Mengal and Maulana Elahi Bakhsh Zehri of the PWP. He said Mr Kakar had no tribal enmity or dispute with any person in his area and he had been removed from the political scene under a conspiracy.

He said the assailant had intercepted Mr Kakar’s vehicle near his illegal mini-petrol pump established on government land and opened fire on him.

Mr Agha said the assailant had been killed by men who wanted to cover up the conspiracy.

He accused a nationalist party and a religious organization of helping those involved in the murder.

He said the Bostan and Pishin administrations had been informed about activities of the criminals two days back and police arrested some people but released them later.

He demanded that the superintendent of police, Pishin, and Bostan naib tehsildar should be suspended and interrogated in this regard.

He demanded that Balochistan Governor Owais Ahmed Ghani and the provincial government should ensure arrest of all the accused within 24 hours. Otherwise, he warned, the PWP would launch a movement.

Nasrullah Kakar started his political career with the students’ wing of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam. In the early 1980s he formed the Islamic Youth Force, which was a strong supporter of the Afghan jihad.

Later, he joined the JUI but quit it and formed the PWP after developing differences with the party’s leadership.

He was considered a supporter of President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s policies. Recently, he had started publishing a daily, Inqilab-i-Nou, in Quetta.