Police swoop on Bhutto supporters

Pakistani authorities mounted a massive security operation today to hold opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for the second time in five days and prevent her from staging a protest march against emergency rule.

An aide to Bhutto claimed her supporters would sweep away the barricades and allow her to embark on the planned three-day procession.

However, police swiftly detained the first demonstrators to arrive at the cordon around her home in Lahore.

The clampdown on Bhutto's planned 180-mile journey from Lahore to the capital Islamabad intensifies the political crisis engulfing Pakistan and further clouds the prospect of her forming a pro-US alliance against rising Islamic extremism with President Pervez Musharraf.

Thousands of riot police blocked all roads leading to a wealthy area of Lahore from where Bhutto wanted to lead the procession against Musharraf’s assumption of emergency powers.

A total of eight trucks or tractors pulling trailers, all of them loaded with sand, were parked across one street.

Police stood behind the vehicles and a row of metal barricades topped with barbed wire. The house of an MP, where Bhutto was staying, was out of sight for reporters, who were prevented from crossing the cordon.

Bhutto’s aide, Senator Safdar Abbasi, said the seven-day detention order was not binding because neither Bhutto nor one of her representatives had been served with the document.

“She will defy the ban,” Abbasi said. “We are ready for the long march and our supporters will remove all the police blockades in the way of their leader.”

But Aftab Cheema, the chief of operations of Lahore city police, said a Bhutto representative had received the order issued by the government of Punjab province.

“She has been detained and she won’t be allowed to come out,” Cheema said. “Her residence is now a sub-jail.”

Police detained about 20 Bhutto supporters, including two party officials and two MPs who tried to cross the barricades and drove them away in prison service vans.

“They are depriving us of our fundamental right to protest against authoritarian rule and hold a long march for the revival of democracy,” Yusuf Raza Gilani, a former speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly said as he was led away.

Farzana Raja, a spokeswoman for Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, claimed thousands of its activists had been rounded up to thwart the march. Raja too was detained.