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Islamabad: Thousands of lawyers rallied across the country on Thursday to mark a day of solidarity with detained chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.
Meetings were held by bar associations and processions were held in Islamabad and in the provincial capitals of Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.
Sacked senior Supreme Court judge Rana Bhagwandas addressed the general body meeting of the Sindh High Court Bar Association in Karachi, lauding the courageous stand of the deposed chief justice.
Bhagwandas said Pakistanis remembered and honoured good people after they were gone but for the first time were paying tribute and recognising the services of the ousted chief justice in his lifetime by observing "Iftikhar Day."
The lawyers were joined by civil society activists as they marched from the Sindh High Court building to the Press Club in Karachi, chanting anti-government slogans.
Addressed
In Rawalpindi, the lawyers staged a rally from the district courts, which was addressed by the wife of detained former Supreme Court Bar Association president, retired justice Tariq Mehmood. She said her husband was gravely ill under detention but the authorities had refused his transfer to hospital.
The head of the Rawalpindi branch of the Lahore High Court, Sardar Asmatullah, told the rally the deposed chief justice had become a "heart throb of the 160 million people of Pakistan." He asserted the movement of the lawyers for his reinstatement would meet with success.
It was announced at a rally in Lahore that a national convention of lawyers would be held in Islamabad on February 9.
In Islamabad, hundreds of attorneys in black suits torched a small cloth dummy of Musharraf outside Chaudhry's residence and chanted "Death to Musharraf".
Separately around 3,000 lawyers, joined by members of former cricketer Imran Khan's opposition political party and hundreds of hardliners, also burned an effigy of the president in the eastern city of Lahore.
A further 4,000 protesters shouted "Go Musharraf, go" in Karachi and there were protests in the central city of Multan.
A bomb exploded outside an anti-terrorism court in the southwestern city of Quetta, wounding three people. It was not immediately clear if it was linked to the lawyers' protests. The legal community has held weekly protests to call for the release of Chaudhry and several top lawyers who have been detained since November, despite the lifting of emergency rule on December 15.
- With inputs from agencies
Musharraf under fire
A group of retired senior military officers said yesterday President Pervez Musharraf should hand over power to the judge he sacked three months ago to ensure national elections are fair.
"General Musharraf's continuation in power is damaging to the country. He should quit," retired Air Marshal Asghar Khan told journalists after a meeting of a committee formed to make recommendations.
"He should hand over power to Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry," he told a news conference in an Islamabad hotel.
Pakistan's Western allies hope the vote on February 18 will restore stability after months of unrest over Musharraf's manoeuvres to hold on to power amid a surge in militant violence.
- Reuters
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