Political violence during a by-election in Pakistan's biggest city Karachi killed 31 people, officials said yesterday.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik went to the city for talks on how to bring an end to the violence and said more than 60 people had been arrested in connection with the killings.
"We want to end political killings in Karachi. After every two or three months a new wave of killings starts. The people of Karachi have to bear the unrest again and again and this has to end," Malik told reporters.
Karachi residents on Sunday elected Saifuddin Khalid from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement as provincial lawmaker to replace the MQM's Raza Haider, who was shot dead by gunmen in August.
A wave of violence that followed Haider's death claimed 85 lives in the teeming city of 16 million.
Police surgeon Hamid Parhiar said the latest deaths on Saturday and Sunday were being treated as politically linked targeted killings.
"At least 31 deaths have been recorded in targeted killings in different hospitals of the city so far," Parhiar told AFP. "They had bullet wounds and appeared to be ordinary people from the lower middle class."
Karachi is plagued by ethnic and sectarian killings, crime and kidnappings. Tensions are high between the MQM and the Awami National Party (ANP), which represent different communities in Karachi, straddling political fault lines.
The MQM is a partner in the ruling coalition led by the Pakistan People's Party in Sindh province. It represents the Urdu-speaking majority in Karachi while the ANP's powerbase is Pashtuns who migrated from the northwest.
A senior Karachi police official, Fayyaz Leghari, put the death toll at 30 and said that at least 40 people were injured.
Witnesses said that shops, markets and offices in the city were open on Monday but the atmosphere was tense.
A founding member of the MQM, Imran Farooq, who was living in exile in Britain, was brutally murdered outside his north London home in September.
The government has not released exact figures, but rights groups say more than 260 targeted killings were reported in Karachi during the first six months of this year, compared with 156 during the same period in 2009.
SUPREME COURT PRESSURE
Reuters adds speculation is growing that Pakistan's Supreme Court would uphold the scrapping of an amnesty law, possibly opening the door to attempts to prosecute government leaders, including Zardari.
The law allowed some current politicians -- including Zardari -- to return after years of exile, but was thrown out in December 2009 by the Supreme Court which must now pronounce on a government attempt to overturn that ruling.