Suspects quizzed over

The Pakistani police questioned several suspects Tuesday over multiple blasts in Karachi which killed one person and wounded 37, the second attack in as many days to hit the key ally in the ‘war on terror’. The string of six explosions in the volatile southern port city came a day after a suicide bombing in the capital Islamabad killed 19 people near a rally marking the first anniversary of a bloody government raid on a radical mosque. Pakistan’s new government is facing growing unrest despite beating embattled president Pervez Musharraf’s allies in elections in February, with Islamist violence on the rise and political divisions growing. Five men were being questioned on Tuesday after they were arrested in connection with the blasts, said Babar Khattak, the police chief of Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital. ‘We have detained five people from different parts of the city after our investigators got some leads about their involvement in the blasts,’ Khattak said. ‘We cannot disclose to which group they belong or what we have recovered from them,’ he said. City police chief Wasim Ahmed said ‘a few’ more suspects had been arrested in addition to the five seized earlier and that jihadi materials had been confiscated from them. ‘We have seized hate literature in books and CDs,’ Ahmed said. An uneasy calm hung over the city of 12 million people with most gas stations closed because of fears of possible riots. Traffic was thin and attendance at government offices was slim, witnesses said. The provincial chief minister, Qaim Ali Shah, said Monday evening’s bombs were meant to ‘destabilise the coalition government’ which won the national elections, state media said. The government comprises the party of former premier Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December, and the grouping of ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif. There was no claim of responsibility for the blasts but television channels quoted Shah as saying that authorities had been forewarned about Taliban militants from the northwestern border with Afghanistan. The police said that the blasts were likely to be an attempt to stir up ethnic tensions in the troubled city because most happened in areas populated by Pashtuns, who originally hail from the northwestern frontier with Afghanistan. Investigators were meanwhile trying to establish who was behind Sunday’s blast in Islamabad, which hit police guarding a protest by Islamists against the deaths of more than 100 people in the siege and storming of the Red Mosque.