Pakistan vows to hold polls as planned despite violence

Pakistan’s national election will go ahead as scheduled next Thursday despite security challenges, the election commission said on Thursday following a meeting to discuss increasing pre-poll violence in the west of the country.
The meeting included top security officials to discuss the clashes in the provinces of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan after the killing of a candidate in a tribal district along the Afghan border a day earlier.
A statement from the commission quoted Chief Election Commissioner Sikander Sultan Raja as saying that it is ready to conduct the polls with the help of security agencies and the army.
Fears had risen about a possible delay with incidents of violence.
That speculation rose when the commission summoned an emergency meeting on Thursday.
The Senate had also passed a non-binding resolution calling for the elections to be delayed.
Caretaker Interior Minister Gohar Ejaz, responsible for overseeing security in the country, vowed that elections would go ahead as planned.
“There should be no doubts that the election will be on February 8,” Ejaz said.
Pakistan faces twin insurgencies – one in northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa by religious militant groups and one in the southwest by ethno-nationalist Baloch groups.
A national assembly candidate was shot dead on Wednesday in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
On the same day, another political leader was shot dead in his party’s election office in Balochistan.
Fifteen political figures in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have faced death threats from militants over the past two months, a senior officer from the Counter Terrorism Department told AFP.
On Tuesday, a bomb attack following an election rally killed four people in Balochistan. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
The blast took place near a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) rally in the provincial capital Quetta.
“Security is currently on high alert, all our teams are carrying out extra patrols, snap-checks are also being done, everyone knows that there is a threat in the entire province,” said Tariq Jawad, an officer in Quetta, on Thursday.
Separatist Baloch militants, including three suicide bombers, also launched a massive co-ordinated attack on a town in Balochistan on Monday which took hours for security forces to clear.
At least 15 people were killed.
Rich mineral deposits in Pakistan’s largest but poorest province have been at the centre of Islamabad’s battle with ethnic Baloch separatist factions there.
Locals say they do not get their fair share of wealth from the oil and gas reserves, with the region consistently ranking at the bottom of Pakistan’s human development indicators.
The US State Department has already expressed concern about the violence, which it said could undermine the electoral process.
An anti-graft court jailed former prime minister Imran Khan for 14 years each on charges of illegally selling state gifts, his party said on Wednesday, a day after Khan was jailed for 10 years in another case.
The sentence, after the third conviction handed down to the ex-cricket star in the last few months, also included a 10-year disqualification from holding public office. – Reuters/AFP