Pakistani police uses sticks to beat up supporters of former Premier Nawaz Sharif and his right-wing allies in the southern port city of Karachi. Law enforcement agencies also detained several dozens protesters from PML-N and Jamaat-e-Islami party in Karachi Thursday, media reports said. 'No one will be allowed to disturb peace in the city,' Karachi police Chief Waseem Ahmed told reporters shortly after the skirmishes. Later, more than a thousand people left in a motor convoy for Islamabad where they planned to stage an open-end sit-in in the capital. But they were stopped on the main highway leaving Karachi, where the angry crowd pelted the police with stones and set fire to vehicles. Sharif has urged the masses to join a nationwide protest against the government, led by Pakistan's People Party Co-Chairman and President Asif Ali Zardari. Organizers had hoped tens of thousands of people would join a four-day protest march to Islamabad, which began Thursday in Karachi and ends in the capital on March 16. Also, activist lawyers have been demanding Zardari fulfill a pledge to reinstate judges fired by Pervez Musharraf, a general who ousted Sharif as prime minister in a 1999 coup. But the protest movement heated up last month when the Supreme Court banned Sharif and his brother from elected office. Sharif and his supporters accused Zardari of influencing the court's verdict, an allegation denied by the president. Police has arrested a large number of opposition workers in Punjab and Sindh provinces to maintain public order. The PPP-led government says the planned march is aimed at destabilizing the country. Information Minister Sherry Rehman on Wednesday described the Sharif brothers' move as a 'rebellion' against the government. Earlier, Pakistan's interior ministry had threatened to prosecute Muslim League-N chief and his brother for sedition. "Their statements fall in the (category of) sedition," Interior Ministry Chief Rehman Malik told a new conference in Islamabad on Monday. He also read out several excerpts from speeches that Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz had made since the Supreme Court disqualified them from holding public office. The developments could destabilize the central government and leave a negative impact on the violence-wracked country, raising the prospect of confrontation between the country's main political parties.
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