ISLAMABAD: Authorities on Friday made face masks mandatory for the residents of Karachi, Pakistan's most densely populated seaside metropolis, to prevent further spread of the novel coronavirus, announced an official statement.
Commissioner Iftikhar Shalwani instructed his subordinates to encourage the residents of the city to cover their faces in public. He also directed them to act against those individuals who violate the instruction by imposing a penalty of up to Rs.500 (US$3.13).
"Make sure that shopkeepers and markets are following the SOPs [standard operating procedures]," Shalwani said, referring to the officially prescribed safety measures to deal with the pandemic.
"Shopkeepers must cover their faces and not let customers enter their outlets without fallther restrictions as new coronavirus infections have surged across the country, with 1,376 new cases and 30 deaths recorded in the last 24 hours, according to a government portal.
Apart from Karachi, Peshawar, the capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, also made face masks mandatory in all indoor and outdoor places and on transportation services. All bazaars, shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, bakeries, wedding halls, beauty parlors and barbershops have been ordered to close shop at 10pm and amusement parks at 6pm.
The southern Sindh province reported 556 cases and 17 deaths on Thursday, its highest daily totals since July 29, when the province registered 654 cases.
Sindh’s case tally now stands at 148,343, Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah said in a statement.
The province also recorded 17 deaths in the past 24 hours, a three-month record. The provincial death toll has risen to 2,664.
Despite the rising cases, Pakistan’s federal and provincial administrations on Thursday decided not to close education institutes.
“All provincial education authorities, head of education boards and other participants reached a consensus decision that there was no need to close education institutes under the present circumstances. Therefore, education institutes will continue to remain open,” the federal education ministry said in a Twitter post on Thursday.
Last week, Pakistan’s de facto health minister, Dr. Faisal Sultan, announced that the second wave of coronavirus had arrived and new restrictions and lockdowns were “inevitable.”
Prime Minister Khan has repeatedly said the country would need to learn to “live with” the virus to avert pushing tens of millions living on daily wages into destitution.
Pakistan began to lift its lockdown, imposed in March, on May 9, about two weeks before the Eid Al-Fitr festival that marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and is celebrated with congregation prayers, family gatherings and feasting. Transport and most businesses reopened but cinemas, theaters and schools remain closed.
In August, the government announced that virtually all sectors shut down to prevent the spread of the coronavirus would be reopened that month, other than schools and marriage halls, which opened in September. There has been an uptick in infection numbers since.
Karachi makes face masks mandatory as coronavirus cases surge in Pakistan
https://arab.news/ghc8b
Karachi makes face masks mandatory as coronavirus cases surge in Pakistan
- People violating officially prescribed safety measures to prevent further infections could be fined up to Rs.500
- Similar restrictions are gradually imposed in other major cities as the second wave of the virus sweeps the country
Pakistani man convicted in US in political assassination plot tied to Iranian paramilitary
- Asif Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses
- He testified he met a Revolutionary Guard operative who gave him countersurveillance training, assignments
NEW YORK: A Pakistani business owner who tried to hire hit men to kill a US politician was convicted Friday in a trial that showcased allegations of Iran-backed plotting on American soil.
As the Iran war unfolded in the Mideast, Asif Merchant acknowledged in a US court that he sought to put an assassination in motion during the 2024 presidential campaign — a plot that was quickly disrupted by American investigators before it had a chance to proceed.
A jury in Brooklyn convicted Merchant on terrorism and murder for hire charges.
The verdict after only a couple hours of deliberations followed a weeklong trial that included remarkable testimony from Merchant himself.
Merchant told the jury he was carrying out instructions from a contact in the Islamic Republic’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. According to Merchant, the handler never specified a target but broached names including then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who was also in the race for a time.
The Iranian government has denied trying to kill US officials.
The nascent plot fell apart after Merchant showed an acquaintance what he had in mind by using objects on a napkin to depict a shooting at a rally. He asked the man to help him hire assassins. Instead, he was introduced to undercover FBI agents who were secretly recording him, as had the acquaintance.
Merchant told the supposed hit men he needed services that could include killing “some political person” and paid them $5,000 in cash in a parked car in Manhattan.
“This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement released after the conviction.
Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, didn’t immediately reply to a message seeking comment.
Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, in Pakistan and Iran, and he sometimes visited the US for his garment business.
Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative about three years ago. The contact gave him countersurveillance training and assignments including the assassination scheme, Merchant said.
He maintained that he had to do his handler’s bidding to protect loved ones in Iran. The defendant said he reluctantly went through the motions but thought he’d be arrested and explain his situation to authorities before anyone was killed.
“I was going along with it,” he said, speaking in Urdu through a court interpreter.
Prosecutors emphasized that Merchant admitted taking steps to enact the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the US considers a foreign terrorist organization, and he didn’t proactively go to authorities.
Instead, he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the Butler gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
When Merchant subsequently spoke to FBI agents to explore the possibility of a cooperation agreement, he didn’t say he had acted out of fear for his family.
Prosecutors argued that he didn’t back up a defense of acting under duress. Merchant sought to persuade jurors he simply didn’t think the agents would believe him because they seemed to “think that I am some type of super-spy,” which he said he was “absolutely not.”
