This is a digitized version of a report from the NYT’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. NYT is preserving these articles as they originally appeared.
KARACHI, Pakistan, July 10 (AP)—At least 19 more persons in Karachi and in three other towns in Sind Province were reported killed today in the third day of clashes brought about by the choice of Sindhi as the province’s official language. Authorities imposed another 24‐ hour curfew and turned enforcement over to the army.
At least 47 persons have been killed since Friday night, when violent demonstrations broke out after the Sind assembly passed a bill making Sindhi the official provincial language. The demonstrators want equivalent status for Urdu, the official Pakistani language, spoken by at least half of Karachi’s four million residents.
Demonstrators erected road blocks and set fire today to a main Government building in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.
Witnesses said that policemen had fired into a protest march in the industrial suburb of Korangi, killing four persons and wounding at least six others. At least two more per sons were killed in a clash in Lair, another suburb, hospital authorities there reported.
Official sources said demonstrations in Hyderabad, the country’s second largest city, took five lives. Other reports said at least nine persons had been killed when funeral pro cessions carrying the bodies of two pro‐Urdu demonstrators shot to death yesterday came under fire.
Authorities reported that two more persons died in fighting in the cities of Hala and Tando Allayhar. The curfew applies to these two communities and Hyderabad. Six persons were reported killed and 14 wounded in clashes near the village of Gabol, between Karachi and Hyderabad.
President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto planned to confer with Sindhi and Urdu proponents in an attempt to halt the violence and resolve the language dispute.
Army enforcement of the curfew marked the first time since Mr. Bhutto took office last December that the military has intervened in domestic troubles.
The Sind assembly was the only one to adopt a regional language as its official tongue. The other three Pakistani provinces—The Punjab, Baluchistan and the North‐West Frontier— have adopted Urdu, the official national language, as their provincial languages. In The Pun jab, Urdu and Punjabi were given equal status.
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Courtesy: The New York Times (Digitized version of print version published on July 11, 1972)
