‘Half of polling centres prone to sudden violence’: thousands of troops deployed

Close to half of polling stations across Pakistan for next week’s parliamentary elections are prone to sudden eruption of bloody violence, the Interior Ministry warned, but said thousand of troops would man such centres.
“Army has started mobilising and moving to their respective areas of deployment on Tuesday and would complete its deployment by February 15,” Brigadier Javed Cheema (Retd) told reporters here on Tuesday.
Paramilitary troops from the Rangers and Frontier Corps (FC), which were run by the Interior Ministry, were also being deployed to stand guard in areas where the chaos was imminent, he said. “All these arrangements have been made to ensure that people cast their vote without any fear in an environment of peace and order. Nobody would be allowed to disrupt the polling process or create any law and order situation,” Cheema said.
He said the authorities had drawn up plans to provide security for more than 64,000 polling stations across the country. A categorisation of these stations placed 14 percent or 8,928 of them in the “most sensitive” category-means the violence there is highly likely a probability.
Almost 30 percent or 19,380 are sensitive that suggests they are also exposed to bloody clashes among the supporters of rival contenders. The most worrying situation is in lawless tribal regions where all the 1,122 polling cantres are in “highly sensitive” category, the categorisation chart showed.
A suicide bomb attack at a campaign rally of a candidate, backed by a Pushtoon nationalist party, killed six of his supporters in Mir Ali town of North Waziristan agency on Monday. More than 20 activists of the same party died when a suspected suicide bomber hit an election meeting in Charsadda district over the weekend in an apparent attempt to target its top leadership.
Fifty six percent or 35,868 polling stations are normal. But there is no concrete assurance the voting next Monday would be peaceful at these centres even. More than 1,000 international observers and journalists were coming to monitor the polls, Cheema added.
These monitors were free to go all over Pakistan except the whole of tribal belt, some areas in the Frontier province, parts of Sindh and three districts of Balochistan, Cheema said. Pakistan has been hit by a wave of suicide bombings in the run-up to the elections, most notably an attack at a political rally on December 27 last year that killed Benazir Bhutto.