Elections in Pakistan hit by gun battles

Press, 2 December 1987, Page 10

Elections in Pakistan hit by gun battles

NZPA-Reuter Islamabad

Widespread gun battles have left at least 14 people dead and many wounded during local council elections in Pakistan, the first nationwide voting since the end of martial law in 1985, the police and residents reported. Eight people died in clashes between rival groups in different districts of the most populous Punjab province yesterday, onlookers told reporters. The police said three were killed in the Sind provincial capital, Karachi, and three in the North West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P.) border-

ing Afghanistan. According to residents in Punjab, three people were killed in the district of Faisalabad, two in Gujrat, and one each in Multan, Sahiwal and Sialkot districts.

Two people died in the southern N.W.F.P. town of Bannu and one in Charsadda near the provincial capital of Peshawar, police sources said. Onlookers also reported gunfights in the Punjab towns of Lahore and Rawalpindi and the N.W.F.P. towns of Peshawar, Mardan and Akora Khattak. Several people were injured there.

The police fired tear

gas and made baton charges to break up the clashes.

In the vast but sparsely populated southwestern province of Baluchistan, a car bomb near a polling station in the provincial capital of Quetta wounded three people. Another blast injured a man northwest of the city.

There was no immediate word if the explosions were linked to the elections. Previously, authorities have blamed the Soviet-backed Afghan Government for a series of bomb blasts which have killed more than 200 people this year. Opposition sources said more than 100 people

were injured in violence during polling in Sind, the home province both of the Prime Minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, and main opposition figure, Benazir Bhutto.

The polls for a total of 75,000 seats in rural district and village councils and urban municipal bodies were the first since President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq ended more than eight years of martial law in 1985. Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (P.P.P.) called off an eight-year boycott to give its supporters experience in fighting elections before 1990, when Parliamentary polls are due to be held.