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Pakistan protesters march on parliament in red zone | |
(about 5 hours later) | |
Anti-government demonstrators in Pakistan are advancing towards parliament, breaching a designated secure zone in the capital Islamabad. | |
Protesters used wire cutters and cranes to move shipping containers barricading the so-called red zone, which houses state buildings and foreign embassies. | |
They have encountered no resistance so far from security forces, who have been instructed to avoid violence. | |
The demonstrators want Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign. | |
Thousands of anti-government protesters have been occupying two Islamabad highways. | |
Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, has been leading one group of protesters since Friday. | |
He accuses Mr Sharif's PML-N party of vote-rigging in the 2013 election and has called on him to stand down. | |
Mr Sharif's party won that election by a landslide in what was Pakistan's first peaceful transfer of power between two civilian democratic governments. | |
'Blood boiling' | |
Anti-government cleric Tahirul Qadri has also mobilised his supporters to march on Islamabad. | |
The government has accused the protesters of attempting to derail democracy. They have offered talks with the demonstrators, but these have been rejected. | |
The protesters are advancing at a snail's pace, and are not likely to reach the parliament until late in the night, the BBC's Ilyas Khan in Islamabad reports. | |
Thousands of policemen are deployed around the red zone, and appear to be equipped with riot gear and teargas shells, but not firearms, our correspondent adds. | |
At the scene: Ilyas Khan, BBC News, Islamabad | |
The protesters chanted slogans as they breached the barriers to enter Islamabad's high security zone. The police offered no resistance, though they did steer the crowd through a single route instead of allowing them to spread out. | |
So tens of thousands of protesters are now set to occupy Constitution Avenue, which many believe will paralyse key state institutions, such as parliament, the Supreme Court and the federal ministries. | |
The unrest has seen the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif put on the back foot; first it decided not to resist the protesters' convergence on Islamabad, and later conceded their demands of setting up protest camps where they wanted. | |
Now that they are inside the capital's "red zone", many fear the government's options to defuse the crisis may be shrinking. | |
Earlier on Tuesday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar said: "The government has decided to hand over the security of the red zone of Islamabad to the army." | |
Some observers said the move could indicate that the government had the support of the military. | |
Fear of violence | |
Supporters of Mr Khan and Mr Qadri are angry about Pakistan's poorly performing economy, growing militancy, and the government's failure to deliver services such as a steady electricity supply. | Supporters of Mr Khan and Mr Qadri are angry about Pakistan's poorly performing economy, growing militancy, and the government's failure to deliver services such as a steady electricity supply. |
But other opposition figures have criticised the demonstrations and Mr Khan's call for people to stop paying tax bills in protest at the government. | But other opposition figures have criticised the demonstrations and Mr Khan's call for people to stop paying tax bills in protest at the government. |
In a country with a history of military coups, there is a fear of violence and of a possible army reaction, correspondents say. | In a country with a history of military coups, there is a fear of violence and of a possible army reaction, correspondents say. |
On Monday MPs from Imran Khan's PTI party vowed to quit their national assembly seats. | |
The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) party has 34 of the national assembly's 342 seats, making it the second-biggest opposition group. The lawmakers have yet to tender their formal resignations to the speaker of the national assembly. | |
The party said it would also resign from seats on provincial assemblies, except for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which it governs. |