Sunni Tehreek distances itself from TLP

Requests state to release all its workers

HYDERABABD: With the state asserting its writ in the on-going crackdown against Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), the religious party's electoral allies have distanced themselves from the TLP. Pakistan Sunni Tehreek (PST) provincial leader Khalid Hussain Attari, at a press conference in Hyderabad on Saturday, clarified that his party was never part of the November 25 call for protest which was given by the TLP.

"The TLP's leader Khadim Hussain Rizvi has sullied the image of Ahl-e-Sunnat," Attari said. He condemned the language in which Rizvi has been criticising the state's institutions.



Attari bewailed that PST's workers were being detained in the countrywide crackdown launched against the TLP. According to him, at least 40 persons associated with the party, including the leader Akbar Raza Qadri, have been arrested on Friday night.

"Abid Qadri is missing. His detention hasn't been declared," he claimed. Attari said he and his party's supporters were patriotic Pakistanis.

"We have always supported the state and its institutions and will keep doing so. We can never even think using foul language." He urged the law enforcement agencies to release all the workers and supporters of his party.



Jamaat-e-Ahle-Sunnat's Allama Muharramuddin Qadri and Daira-e-Islam International's Allama Jawad Raza Barkati also separately spoke.

Following the detention of Rizvi, the police and rangers sealed all the places in Hyderabad where the TLP's workers staged sit-in demonstrations in the past, preventing even a single sit-in protest from occurring on Friday night.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 25^th, 2018.