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Mufti Shamzai is no more
KARACHI, Pakistan: Gunmen riding in two cars and a motorcycle opened fire on a pick up truck carrying a senior Sunni Muslim cleric in this violence-prone city Sunday, killing him and wounding four other people, police said. The cleric - Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai - died of gunshot wounds in a nearby hospital. He was attacked while he was driving to an Islamic seminary that he headed in an eastern Karachi neighborhood, said Fayyaz Qureshi, a Karachi police official. A body guard of Shamzai returned fire wounding one of the six attackers, Qureshi said, quoting witnesses. Among the four people who were injured in the attack on Shamzai was one of his sons, a nephew, his driver and two body guards, Qureshi said. None of them were listed to be seriously hurt. Shamzai, who was in his 70s, headed Jamia Islamia Binori Town, where thousands of students get Islamic education. His killing is likely to spark violence by his supporters. No one was arrested for the attack on Shamzai and there was no claim of responsibility for involvement.

More, from Khaleej Times...
Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, who had called for a “jihad”, or holy war, against the United States after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was wounded along with his son, a relative, a bodyguard and a driver, police said. “As soon as we sat in the car, we heard gun shots and we immediately ducked,” the cleric’s relative Rafiuddin told reporters. “I felt a strong pain in my leg, I had been shot and than I saw Mufti Shamzai Sahib covered in blood.”
I do hope he wasn't killed instantly...
It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack or whether it was a sectarian killing.
Bloodthirsty Shiites? MQM hard boyz? Perv's hard boyz?
Migrating Esquimaux?
“He has expired,” a hospital source said about Shamzai, one of the country’s most revered Sunni clerics. “We have not yet announced it because there is a huge mob outside and we are worried about a law and order situation.” A witness told Reuters that at least four men opened fire as Shamzai headed for his seminary from his home nearby. Private television channel Geo said the attackers escaped by car and motorcycle.
Motorcycles of Doom™. A nice touch, that...
Violent riots demonstrations predictably broke out in several parts of Karachi. Small groups of Islamic militants and Shamzai’s followers came out on the streets to protest, pelting vehicles with stones and burning tyres. A Reuters correspondent at the scene said thousands of people, many carrying batons, had gathered near the seminary, located in a central commercial area, and had set fire to two banks and several shops. “There is a lot of smoke in the air from the burning tyres and building, glass is scattered all around from damaged vehicles, and people are really charged,” he said.

“There is heavy shelling of tear-gas and police fired gun shots in the air to disperse the crowd,” another witness said. Protesters set fire to a police station, torching two parked vehicles and partly damaging the building, police said. Another witness told Reuters police used tear-gas to disperse smaller crowds at several other places.

Ishratul Ibad, the governor of the province of Sindh, whose capital is Karachi, appealed for calm. “I appeal to the people and to his supporters as well, we all equally share the grief, but cooperate with us and we will certainly catch his killers,” Ibad said on Geo television.

Shamzai belonged to the hardline Deobandi school of Islamic thought, which has provided thousands of fighters to the Taleban in neighbouring Afghanistan. Several Pakistani Islamic militant groups considered him their spiritual leader. His seminary, Jamiat-ul-Uloom-il-Islamaiyyah, also known as Banuri Town, taught many students who went on to become important members of the Taleban regime in Kabul. Two very senior clerics of the seminary were also murdered in 1999 and 1998. Shamzai led a delegation of Pakistani clerics and intelligence officials to the Taleban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar with a message from the government soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
When he reportedly told Mullah Omar not to give in...
At the time, militant sources had said Shamzai held a separate meeting with Omar to assure him of the support of Pakistani clerics, against the wishes of the government of President Pervez Musharraf.

Karachi has suffered a spate of militant and sectarian violence in the recent past. Fifteen Shi’ite worshippers were killed this month in a suicide bomb attack on a mosque and a policeman was killed when two car bombs went off this week near the home of the US consul. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of Pakistan’s largest Islamic political party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, got his name in the papers again condemned the killing, saying the government had failed to protect spiritual leaders. ”I am deeply anguished,” he said on Geo television.
Posted by: Fred 2004-05-30
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=34262