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Pakistan detains opposition leader Nawaz Sharif
Associated Press - March 15, 2009
Babar Dogar, Lahore – Police put opposition leader Nawaz Sharif under house arrest Sunday and clashed with anti-government demonstrators, fanning a political crisis that has alarmed the United States about Pakistan's stability in the face of rising Islamist violence.
Sharif is locked in a bitter power struggle with Pakistan's president that threatens to paralyze politics in the nuclear-armed country and dilute its focus on tackling economic woes as well as Taliban militants operating along the Afghan border.
Hundreds of police surrounded the former prime minister's residence in the eastern city of Lahore before dawn on Sunday and detained him along with scores of his supporters.
Officers showed party officials an order placing Sharif and his politician brother Shahbaz under house arrest for three days, party spokesman Pervaiz Rasheed said.
Shahbaz and a host of other protest leaders went underground to dodge similar orders. Rao Iftikhar, a senior government official, said the list of those facing detention also included the head of Pakistan's main Islamist party and a leader of its activist lawyers.
Lawyers and opposition party supporters had planned to gather Sunday near Lahore's main court complex before heading toward Islamabad to stage a mass sit-in front of Parliament, in defiance of a government ban.
To thwart them, authorities parked trucks across major roads on the edge of the city and riot police took up positions outside the railway station and government buildings.
About 1,000 flag-waving demonstrators defied police barricades to reach the courts. At one point, protesters pelted some of the hundreds of riot police ringing the area with rocks.
An Associated Press reporter saw one officer led away with a head wound before his colleagues fired two rounds of tear gas, scattering the crowd.
Television images also showed police commandos wearing flak jackets and armed with assault rifles apparently searching for Shahbaz in Rawalpindi, a city just south of the capital.
Shahbaz, speaking to Geo television by phone, appealed to ordinary Pakistanis to come out onto the streets.
"(President Asif Ali) Zardari has put the nation into this deep crisis by breaking his promises," he said. "These fascist tactics cannot stop the masses who want justice."
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