Bloody infighting among factions within a party allied to Pakistan's government has killed more than 30 people in the country's largest city in the past week, local officials said Tuesday.
The violence is the latest round of a long-running dispute in Karachi between the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and a breakaway faction called the Mohajir Qaumi Movement that has periodically erupted into shootings.
The provincial Sindh government said in a statement Tuesday that 31 people had been shot dead in the past week in different parts of the port city, which has a population of 16 million and is a key supply point for NATO forces operating in Afghanistan.
It is a stronghold of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which is an ally of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party. The breakaway Mohajir Qaumi Movement is seeking to expand its control over pockets of the city.
City police chief Waseem Ahmed said workers and activists from a half dozen political parties in the city have been killed.
Tauseef Ahmed, a political analyst at the state-run Federal Urdu University, said such breakouts of political violence had become routine in the city in the past few years, and usually subsided quickly.
"We see the wave of killing of political workers almost every three months," he said. "It has become part of the political culture unfortunately."
