Nasir continues protest over Hazara killings

Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) legislator Syed Nasir Ali Shah refused to back down from his demand for Governor’s Rule in Balochistan as he sat in outside Parliament House for the second consecutive day in protest against the massacre of the marginalised Hazara community in his province.
“The only solution to the genocide of Hazara community in Quetta, and other target killings in Balochistan, is imposition of Governor’s Rule,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “The provincial government has failed to protect people’s lives and must be dissolved,” he said. Gunmen on motorcycles ordered Hazara Shia passengers off a bus near Quetta and killed 13 of them on Tuesday. It was the second such attack in less than a month.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said buses in Quetta would be protected by armed guards. Talking to reporters outside the Parliament, he said the Balochistan Home Department had been told each van would be guarded by one gunman and each bus by two. Eight police vehicles would patrol Hazara and Mariabad areas of the provincial capital and escort buses if necessary.
But Nasir Shah said the government was protecting the killers rather than the victims. “A four-kilometre area in Quetta is the hub of trouble where killers hide after committing crimes of genocide, and police officials take no action,” he said. Shah said bodies of missing Baloch nationalists were being found every day and no one had been arrested. However, Malik said “external forces” who had created unrest in Karachi were trying to create trouble in Balochistan.