PML-N wants joint session on Karachi attack

ISLAMABAD: The opposition Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) on Wednesday asked the government to call an “open joint session” of parliament to discuss terrorist attack on a naval base in Karachi and said it had decided not to attend any in-camera session in future.

“We demand of the government to convene another joint sitting of the two houses of parliament. It should be an open session.

We will not attend any in-camera session as the country cannot afford to have more such meetings,” opposition leader in the National Assembly Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told reporters.

In a chat with them at the Punjab House in Islamabad, he expressed his concern over what he called a “complete security and intelligence failure” in the attack on PNS Mehran in Karachi and said this and earlier attacks on the army GHQ in Rawalpindi, offices of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) across the country and training centres of the forces had created a “sense of insecurity” in the masses.

Chaudhry Nisar questioned as to how the Karachi raiders, whose number was still unknown to the government, “vanished” in the broad daylight after the attack despite the area being cordoned off by personnel of all the three armed forces, Rangers and even police. He assailed a reported statement of Interior Minister Rehman Malik terming the armed forces’ operation “a great success”.

The opposition leader criticised the government for delaying the constitution of an independent commission demanded by an in-camera joint session of parliament on May 14 to probe May 2 covert US commando raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden.

“The PML-N will react,” he said in response to a question regarding the party’s strategy if the government failed to constitute the independent commission, for which he said he had already written a letter to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani suggesting names of a few persons from judiciary, bar, media and civil society.

“The time for doing normal and routine politics is over,” he said and added: “The government will have to come out with an explanation on it (implementation of the resolution), otherwise there will be a strong reaction on these incidents during the forthcoming budget session (of the National Assembly).”

Chaudhry Nisar said the PML-N leadership, at the highest level, had discussed its future strategy and would announce it in the next few days.

He said he would soon approach other opposition parties in parliament to adopt a joint strategy against the government.

In the second phase, he said, his party would start making contacts with the parties outside the parliament to devise a common strategy keeping aside their own political agendas on a one-point agenda to save the country as “the present rulers cannot be left unchallenged.”

He even went on to say that there was no use of sitting in the present parliament which, he said, had no role to play on important national issues.

The opposition leader regretted that President Asif Ali Zardari had been “silent for the whole month” and had not taken the nation into confidence after the Abbottabad and Karachi incidents. He raised eyebrows over the silence of Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar over the recent incidents in which various defence institutions became the target of terrorism.

He also criticised the president and the prime minister for continuing with their foreign trips while the country was in a “state of war.”