Supporters of outlawed Jamaat-ud-Dawa carry placards as they shout anti-US slogans during a protest against drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal region, in Islamabad, yesterday.
PESHAWAR: Activists from religious parties led protests in Pakistan yesterday to denounce a US drone strike that killed the leader of the country’s Taliban, after the movement named a notorious hardliner as his successor.
Pakistan last week reacted angrily to the drone attack that killed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Hakimullah Mehsud in the North Waziristan tribal area.
The government said it destroyed efforts to begin talks to end the TTP’s bloody six-year insurgency that has left thousands of soldiers, police and civilians dead.
The interior minister accused Washington of sabotaging peace efforts ,and former cricketer Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party, called for a blockade of Nato convoys to Afghanistan.
Around 1,200 supporters of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) religious party staged a protest sit-in yesterday, blocking a Nato supply route in the northwestern city of Peshawar, police and a reporter said.
Pakistan is a key transit route for the US-led mission in landlocked Afghanistan, particularly as Nato forces withdraw by the end of next year. Many of the trucks now are actually removing Nato equipment after 12 years of war.
“Block Nato supply, stop drone attack,” read one banner at the rally. Protesters carrying placards and party flags were shouting anti-US slogans, a reporter said.
In Pakistan’s cultural capital Lahore, more than 200 activists of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), blacklisted as a terror organisation by the United Nations and United States, gathered outside the press club and chanted slogans against the US. AFP
