KARACHI, Oct 19: Another 5,000 policemen will be deployed on the streets of this violent port city in an attempt to quell the relentless bloodletting among ethnic rivals, Pakistani officials said today.The police force is currently about 27,000 strong assisted by another 15,000 paramilitary rangers.Karachi, a teeming city of 14 million people, is wracked by relentless killings often involving rival groups of an ethnic party known as the Muttahed Qami movement.During the weekend Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Karachi and vowed to put an end to the killings that have terrorised entire neighbourhoods. It was after Sharif's trip to Karachi that the provincial government decided to increase its police force, said the officials.``Anti-state elements have their own agenda and they want to push the country towards destruction,'' the independent newspaper The News quoted Sharif as saying. The prime minister, however, did not identify the ``anti-state elements''.Pakistan's largest city, Karachi isthe nation's financial and commercial hub and generates about 70 per cent of the government's revenue.However, ethnic related disturbances routinely interrupt business, which economists estimate has cost the national exchequer billions of rupees.On Saturday a former governor of southern Sindh, of which Karachi is the capital, Hakim Said was gunned down outside his office by masked men who escaped.His death galvanized the city and generated rallies and protest demonstrations throughout the country yesterday.Yesterday in the Eastern Punjab capital of Lahore scores of people held a memorial service for said as well as for a militant religious leader, Maulana Mohammed Abdullah who was killed in Islamabad also on Saturday.The small, but powerful religious group, Jamaat-e-Islami called for the government to step down saying Pakistani lawmakers had failed to halt a spiraling law and order problem.``The law of the jungle is the law of the land today,'' Jamaat leader Hafiz Idrees was quoted assaying.More than 600 people have been killed in ethnic related violence in Karachi so far this year.Meanwhile, PTI reports from Multan say a primary school teacher was shot dead and a police constable critically injured in two separate attacks today. Pakistani police blamed unidentified terrorist groups for the attacks.Officials said the teacher, Khuda Baksh, was cycling home late last night when he was attacked by two motorcycle-borne assailants near Kot Addu, about 100 km from here.In the other incident, gunmen opened fire at a police van near the town of Kabirwala in Punjab, seriously injuring a policeman, they said.
