Pakistan Information & News

Fire Incident In Karachi

KARACHI: At least thirty-nine people as well as many slight children and women were scorched to death as fires entirely overwhelmed many shelties in North Karachi sector five, Chiipa sources said.

12 fire tenders reached on the prospect and started calming the fire meanwhile, many other people were seriously burnt who were shifted to hospital, sources added.

No cause of fire flare-up, in huts made of sticks, could be reported. Several people remained caught in the fire for long time.

Eidhi sources added that over two dozens completely burnt dead bodies including 15 children and women, were shifted to different hospitals. Emergency was declared in Abbasi Shaheed hospital, hospital sources informed to media.

“The deadly blazes overwhelmed around 15 to 20 cabins and huts and completely burnt them down, as people were fast asleep therefore, they could not get themselves rescued after inferno outbreak.”

 The shelties were in the slum kind of area and were covered from three sides while the only way out, entrance and exit of the place, caught fire that made it hard for the unfortunates to flee from the fire scene.

He also feared that as many as three-dozen people must have been burnt in the lethal inferno in slum.

Salvage 1122 workers, on the orders of Syed Mustafa Kamal, city nazim, also arrived on the scene and participated in rescue efforts mutually with fire fighters, local people, town authorities, Chiipa and Edhi workers.

Sherry Rehman

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s foreign office Wednesday confirmed that Ajmal Kasab who is in Indian custody for his alleged involvement in Mumbai attacks, is a Pakistan national.

Earlier, Federal Information minister said an investigation has revealed that the lone surviving Mumbai gunman is a Pakistani citizen, as India has alleged.

Information Minister Sherry Rehman confirmed Kasab was a Pakistani in a text message but gave no other details, said a foreign news agency.

It may be remembered that an earlier news had already indicated that Ajmal Kasab belonged to Pakistan.

However, there is no record of Ajmal Kasab in the database of NADRA.

Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan intensify security from corner to corner the country and even located one city under embargo Wednesday as Muslims began annual Ashura pageants to remember the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain R.A.

‘Infallible security preparations have been completed to maintain law and order during Ashura,’ said Tanvir Ashraf Kaira, a minister in country’s biggest region, central Punjab.

‘Police and other law enforcement agencies have been pretend alert and army people have been organized in responsive districts,’ the minister told media.

‘Security has to be improved in view of the compassion of division’s during the Muslim bereavement period of Muharram, which ends with the Ashura ceremonies, he said.

Authorities placed the northwestern town of Hangu under curfew in a bid to avert sectarian violence, two days after a suicide bomber killed seven people in a nearby town, officials said.

They said police commandos would be deployed along routes used by marchers in North West Frontier Province on the Afghan border, which has been wracked by violence including suicide bombings by Taliban militants.

Muslims stage religious pageants on Ashura to remember the death of the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.W)’s grandson Imam Hussain R.A at Karbala in latter-day Iraq in 680 AD.

Reciting elegies and hymns, partakers hold black banners and demonstration at the back imitations of Hazrat Imam Hussain (R.A)’s crypt in Iraq, beating their backs in a exhibit of attachment.

Pakistan Intelligence

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s intelligence chief said there will not be combat with India over the Mumbai attacks and highlighted terrorism — not India — was the furthermost menace to the kingdom, according to an interview.

Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha also told a foreign news glossy magazine that his influential Inter-Services Intelligence agency — thought to have a high degree of independence — was under the control of the recently elected civilian government.

India blames Pakistani confrontational for the November attacks on aims in Mumbai that killed more than 160 people. The charges have lift up tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors, which have fought three wars in 60 years.

On Tuesday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Pakistani state agencies must have had a hand in the attacks, charges dismissed by Islamabad as “propaganda.”

Pasha told the in Interview, “There will not be war.”

“We are estrangement ourselves from clash with India, both now and in general,” he said.

Pasha rarely gives interviews to reporters, and one of his aides said Wednesday that the comments made in early December were meant to be off the record. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Manmohan Singh

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday squarely blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba for the Mumbai terror strike and pointed out that there was enough evidence to show that the attack, executed with military precision, had the support of some official agencies of Pakistan.

The Prime Minister said terrorism was largely sponsored from outside the country, mainly Pakistan, which “utilised terrorism as an instrument of State policy.”

“We must convince the world community that States that use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy must be isolated and compelled to abandon such tactics. We must engage vigorously in debates to press the point that ‘soft’ support for terrorism cannot any longer be endorsed,” Dr. Singh said at a conference of Chief Ministers on internal security, the first such meet after the November 26, 2008 Mumbai carnage.

While admitting that India’s problems were compounded by the fact that “we have a highly unpredictable and uncertain security environment in our immediate neighbourhood,” he said the governments in some of our neighbouring countries “are very fragile in nature.”

He cautioned that the “more fragile a government, the more it tends to act in an irresponsible fashion. Pakistan’s responses to our various demarches on terrorist attacks are an obvious example.”

The Prime Minister’s tough talk came a day after New Delhi handed over evidence to Islamabad on Pakistan’s involvement in the Mumbai attack.

Dr. Singh was categorical about Pakistan’s complicity in the attack. Pakistan was mentioned eight times in his four-page speech that also dwelt at length on the recent initiatives to combat terror, Left wing extremism and the situation in Jammu and Kashmir.

He stressed that inheritance of a great historical experience of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-caste and multi-lingual society contributed to India’s sense of nationhood. “Today, even as Pakistan engages in whipping up war hysteria, our nation remains steadfastly united and, if anything, the process of national consolidation is becoming stronger.”

Asif Ali Zardari And Hamid Karzai

KABUL: Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari convened his Afghan matching part Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Tuesday, vowed collaboration in the scrap against terrorist in both countries and called for wider provincial understanding.

Relations between Kabul and Islamabad, both U.S. associates but anxious by border quarrels in the earlier period, have enhanced in current months with the entrance of the new administration in Pakistan.

In the past, Afghan officials have frequently blamed rudiments in Pakistani state agencies of helping the Taliban, expelled from power in Kabul but keeping asylums in the tribal areas along the craggy Afghan-Pakistan border.

Zardari, speaking on his first visit to Kabul as president, told a news conference Pakistan was ready to fight side by side with Afghanistan against the resurgent Taliban.

The two neighbors needed international help, but could do the job better themselves than outsiders could, he said.

“We want to tell the world today together, standing shoulder to shoulder, that we are together in this fight against these non-state actors who have taken nations and countries, and in fact superpowers, to war,” Zardari said.

Asked if he would allow foreign troops go into Pakistani country to help clash militants in unstable border areas, Zardari said all the two countries wanted was hold up.

“To the globe we say, ‘Help us. We can struggle. We can care for ourselves all we need is the hold up. Given the suitable hold up, we can do the job superior, and cheaper, and easier than you can do it’,” he said.

Sherry Rehman

ISLAMABAD: In spite of official rebuff of the record handed over by India on proof of the Mumbai attacks, Federal Information and Broadcasting Minister Sherry Rehman has said the administration is still meting out the facts.

Talking solely to foreign T.V channel Sherry said, “Pakistan will hang around until its examinations are compelete, and that it would like its investigators to be given admission to the locations of the fright attacks in Mumbai.”

Stephen Hadley

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush’s national security adviser said Tuesday that Iran is the major challenge President-elect Barack Obama will face in the Middle East and that more approves will be needed to force Tehran to relinquish its nuclear objectives and hold up for radicals.

Exterior the Mideast, the next administration’s pinnacle priority should be stabilizing an increasingly unstable Pakistan, Stephen Hadley said.

In a nearly hour-long discussion with media, Hadley said the Bush White House has been trying to “prop up and store up influence” on Iran to bestow to the Obama government. Obama’s challenge, he said, will be to use those sanctions to force Iran to change its actions.

Saying that European officials have pointed to Tehran’s dependence on gasoline imports and its need for additional refining equipment, Hadley added that “one of the questions is whether these kinds of vulnerabilities provide a potential source of leverage, and this is the kind of dialogue that we will continue to have with the Europeans.”

While the Middle East presents challenges, he said Obama might also find his largest far-off policy prospect there, in the form of a calm agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. That’s a supercilious goal considering the current growth of aggression between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that joystick the Gaza Strip.

Last month, Obama recommended a mixture of economic inducements and tighter sanctions might influence the Iranian administration to change its behavior and change its nuclear program. The U.S. and its associates think that Iran is following nuclear weapons capabilities and has demanded it hang up its enhancement program, but Tehran persists it is concerned only in nuclear power generation.

Iran, however, has cast off the carrot-and-stick move toward as intolerable and insists it has the right to continue.

Hadley would not offer suggestion on whether the inward government should boost dialogue with Iran. But, he said, the U.S. “would be idiotic to talk without influence, because talking and negotiating without leverage won’t get you a deal that will go forward your interests. If you want to change the deeds of a country like Iran, you have to have leverage.”

And right now, he said, the U.S. is still short of the leverage needed to force that change.

Sherry Rehman

ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Sherry Rehman has said that the current Israeli violence in Gaza against guiltless Palestinians is a severe risk to worldwide peace, and the globe have to do something rapidly and fairly to bring an end to it.

“The globe must act quickly and justly to bring to a close the continuing Israeli aggression in Gaza, which is infringing the UN Charter,” she said during a conference with the Charged’ Affairs of Palestine, Jaser Ahmed M. Mohammad, who called on her Monday.

“The circumstances in Gaza shows a depressing charade of impartiality for the Palestinian people who have given many sacrifices and made many cooperation’s along the hard road of their lawful right to statehood,” Sherry said.

Calling upon the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) and the Arab League (AL) to increase hard work for a direct stop to aggression in Gaza, Rehman said that the present situation pretended a main challenge for the worldwide community that needed to work closely with the Muslim world in seeking a just and feasible solution to the Arab-Israeli disagreement.

The Palestinian Charge d’ Affairs briefed the minister on the latest situation in Gaza and the hardships being faced by the Palestinian civilians in the area.

Mumbai Attacks

ISLAMABAD: India said Monday it has handed over several real proofs on the Mumbai attacks to Islamabad with six photographs of believes spoiled in Mumbai plot.

It also said the given credentials on Mumbai bloodshed exposed that the perpetuators belonged to Multan, Okara, and Faisalabad, cities of Pakistan’s Punjab.

According to sources, it also revealed the Internet telephones; one amid others was of U.S’s VOIP, supposedly used in the Mumbai plot.

Proofs also built-in information sought from Ajmal Kasab during investigation.