Violence intensifies across Pakistan

Benazir Bhutto supporters ransacked banks and burned train stations in furious rampages across Pakistan today.

The death of President Pervez Musharraf’s most powerful political opponent in a shooting and bombing attack yesterday plunged the nation into turmoil and threatened its already unsteady role as a vital bulwark against Islamic terror.

Paramilitary rangers were given the authority to use live fire to stop rioters from damaging property in southern Pakistan, said Maj. Asad Ali, the rangers’ spokesman.

“We have orders to shoot at sight,” he said.

About 7,000 people in the central city of Multan ransacked seven banks and a gas station and threw stones at police, who responded with tear gas.

A mob in Karachi looted three banks and set them on fire, police said.

In the capital, Islamabad, about 100 protesters burned tyres in a commercial quarter of the city.

Violent mobs burned 10 railway stations and several trains across Bhutto's Sindh province, forcing the suspension of all train service between the city of Karachi and the eastern Punjab province, said Mir Mohammed Khaskheli, a senior railway official.

The rioters uprooted one section of the track leading to the Indian border, he said.

About 4,000 Bhutto party supporters rallied in the north-western city of Peshawar today and several hundred of them ransacked the office of the main pro-Musharraf party, burning furniture and stationery. The office was empty and no one was hurt.

Protesters, carrying the green, red and black flags of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party shouted “Musharraf dog” and “Bhutto was alive yesterday, Bhutto is alive today”.

Dozens of police in riot gear followed the protesters, but did not intervene.

Protesters in Peshawar also burned the office of a small party allied with Musharraf.

Other areas were nearly deserted today as businesses closed and public transportation came to a halt at the start of three days of national mourning for the opposition leader.

Troops were put on alert in four cities in Sindh as a precaution against new violence, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad.

A coalition of opposition parties called for a general strike, said Mohammed Usman Kakar, a leader in the All Parties Democratic Movement, which comprises small anti-Musharraf groups.

“The repercussions of her murder will continue to unfold for months, even years,” read a mournful editorial in the Dawn newspaper. “What is clear is that Pakistan’s political landscape will never be the same, having lost one of its finest daughters.”

As many Pakistanis mourned, others demanded answers as to who killed her.

Musharraf blamed the attack on the resurgent Islamic militants Pakistan is fighting along the border region with Afghanistan, pledging in a nationally televised speech that “we will not rest until we eliminate these terrorists and root them out”.

But authorities said they had yet to identify the attacker.

“It is too early to say who may have been responsible,” said Saud Aziz, the chief of police in Rawalpindi, the city near Islamabad where the attack took place. A joint task force of police and officials from other law enforcement agencies were investigating, he said.

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko in Washington said the agency was trying to determine the validity of a purported claim of responsibility for the attack by al-Qaida.

Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir have clashed with hundreds of stone-throwing demonstrators, protesting against the assassination, police said.

Police used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators who took to the streets in Srinagar, the main city of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, after this morning’s prayers, said police officer Sajad Ahmed. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Many in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir want independence from mostly Hindu India or a union with mainly Muslim Pakistan.