The members of the Karachi Bar Association (KBA) boycotted on Thursday the courts as a mark of protest against the killing of Awami National Party (ANP) leader Barrister Haroon Bilour and 19 others in a suicide attack in Peshawar.

A general body meeting held on this occasion was addressed by the KBA general secretary, who expressed sympathy with the bereaved families of Haroon Bilour and other victims of the terror attack.

He demanded of the federal government to make every effort to arrest the attackers as well as their patrons and bring them to justice. The meeting also stipulated for a security provision to the lawyers in the country being targeted by terrorists.

A day earlier, remembering the victims of the suicide bombing at an Awami National Party’s electoral rally in Peshawar’s Yakatut area, civil society activists gathered outside Karachi Press Club and shouted slogans against terrorism and for peace.

The Karachi office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) organised the protest, in which a number of leading rights and civil society activists participated.

They carried banners inscribed with portraits of Haroon Bilour, an ANP leader who along with 19 other people was killed when the electoral rally was attacked by a suicide bomber. The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The HRCP’s Asad Iqbal Butt, the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research’s Karamat Ali, the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum’s Saeed Baloch, rights activists Naghma Shaikh, Nida Tanweer and Abubakkar Yousafzai and Qurrat Miraza were prominent among the participants.

Protesters expressed concern over the killing of innocent people in the bombing, and called upon all the political parties to devise a combined strategy to get rid of the menace of terrorism.

Ex-law secy buried

A former law secretary and judge of the banking court, Mir Muhammad Shaikh, was laid to rest at a graveyard in his ancestral village in District Naushahro Feroze on Thursday.

Judicial officers, senior lawyers and office bearers of different bar associations, including Justice (retd) Hassan Feroz, Justice (retd) Shaukat Ali Memon, Bashir Ahmed Khoso, Mir Safdar Talpur, Syed Faiz Rasool Rashidi, Justice Farooq Ali Channa and Parakash Lal Ambwani, attended the funeral and expressed sympathies with the bereaved family.