Associated Press
Associated Press
Oct. 08, 2001 12:34:00
Mobs storm Pakistan city; protester burning U.S. flag catches fire
Associated Press
Oct. 08, 2001 12:34:00
QUETTA, Pakistan - Mobs stormed this city by the Afghan border today, lobbing firebombs while chanting glory to Osama bin Laden and hatred for America. Police shot one man dead in the tear gas-shrouded confusion.
In Peshawar, a pro-Taliban demonstrator was engulfed in fire while
protesters burned a U.S. flag during protests against the sirstrikes. The demonstrator was taken to a hospital, and his present condition is unknown. .
From daybreak to late afternoon, in a huge rally downtown and in street-corner clusters, Muslims shouted support for Afghanistan's Taliban leadership. Compared with the scattered and sporadic protests elsewhere in the country, this was the worst sustained unrest to hit Pakistan over Sunday's U.S.-British attacks.
Thousands surged through the streets in running skirmishes with police, setting ablaze the U.N. Children's Fund compound, the central police station, movie theaters, a bank and other buildings in the city of 800,000.
At least six rioters suffered bullet wounds and 24 others were injured by police batons or tear gas canisters, doctors at Civil Hospital said. Two officers also were hospitalized.
Tear gas hung over parts of Quetta, and gunfire echoed across the old city as police fired repeatedly into the air. Columns of smoke were visible in every direction. Two fire trucks were torched in the street.
"Look what they did," wailed Chaudary Umedali outside the smoking ruins of his movie theater, the Imdad. He had
been showing a Hollywood film: "Desperado."
Umedali said 1,000 people swarmed around the Imdad, smashed in its door and threw firebombs inside. "They didn't like our showing American and English films," he said.
Outside, a huge felled tree lay smoldering on the road. Part of the nearby city market was a charred ruin.
A few shop owners opened their shutters in the morning, but hastily slammed them shut when rioters approached. Several people were beaten badly for trying to do business as usual.
At midday, Maulana Noor Mohammed, local leader of a national religious party, told a shouting crowd of 4,000: "If there is no peace in Afghanistan, there will be no peace anywhere in world."
He warned Muslims everywhere to prepare for holy war in support of the Taliban.
Many of the rioters were bearded and looked like students of religious schools, but there were also thousands of others, from fresh-faced teen-agers to graying men.
As tear gas wafted through the heavy gates of the Serena Hotel, one of Pakistan's leading lawyers, dressed in well-cut suit and black tie, picked glumly at his grapefruit.
"I fear this begins the process of Talibanization of Pakistan," said Abdul Basit, 65.
Basit said President Pervez Musharraf had made "the greatest blunder" by backing Western allies against a neighboring Islamic state. That, he said, undermined his own position and infuriated much of the army.
"All over the Muslim world people would like to make heroes out of people who had no chance before," he said. "The Taliban has a hideous face, but we made them into heroes."
He said he expected Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons capacity, to shift toward leadership of militant Islamic states.
"Too many people are fed up," he concluded. "If you want to see the future of Pakistan, look at Afghanistan."
His 26-year-old colleague, Amjad Pervaiz, added his agreement. "I think we will see a religion revolution in Pakistan," he said.
Others dismiss this analysis as too dire. They note that in Karachi, the country's largest city with 14 million people, only a few hundred protested.
Quetta, on the other hand, is in the heartland of pro-Taliban religious leader Fazl-ur Rehman, whose followers had vowed to wage a holy war against the United States if it attacked neighboring Afghanistan.
By afternoon, two dozen international U.N. employees crowded into the Serena Hotel after their headquarters declared a security alert.
A mob stoned the U.N. refugee agency and two women employees still in the building barely escaped out the back.
Rupert Colville, a U.N. spokesman, said relief operations for Afghan refugees in Quetta were paralyzed because of the threat. "It would be foolhardy to the point of madness" to run trucks through the city, he said.
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