“MQM is registered in Pakistan, therefore, it is better operated from here”. He added that, chief of MQM should quit politics if he cannot control the words.
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MQM leaders Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, Nasreen Jalil, Khawaja Izharul Hassan, Dr Amir Liaquat and many members parliament were present on the occasion.
On Monday, paramilitary forces raided and sealed off the MQM’s headquarters after party rank-and-file stormed the office of a television channel. He announced what amounts to a soft coup within the party, saying that Altaf Hussain’s speech was “regrettable”, “anti-Pakistan” and “anti-MQM”, and that the events of August 22 must never be allowed to happen again.
In his Monday dial-in diatribe, Hussain denounced what he deemed the army’s heavy-handed tactics to silence dissenters and went so far as to call Pakistan itself “a cancer on the world”. Come the morning and there was the ritual apology, as there always is, from a sorrowful Altaf Hussain in London pleading that he was under extreme stress when he made his remarks and he was seemingly under the impression that it was back to business as usual, no matter death, injury and damage.
“From the depth of (my) heart, I beg pardon from the Pakistani establishment”, he said.
Later Tuesday, Hussain’s second-in-command Farooq Sattar, who was also briefly arrested after Monday’s violence, said the MQM “completely disowns” Hussain’s statements, accusing him of repeatedly embarrassing the party.
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Previous charges have not resulted in action or extradition requests against Hussain, who has lived in London since fleeing a military operation against his party in 1992 and is a British citizen. Nearly every political party, and even the Pakistani Taliban and other militant networks, have multiple factions consumed as much by infighting as anything else.
