KARACHI/HYDERABAD/ISLAMABAD: Amid rigging claims by the political parties due to the slow announcement of results in Karachi, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was leading in Hyderabad local government (LG) elections and for the first time was in a position to appoint its mayor in Sindh’s second-largest city, unofficial results showed on Monday.
So far, results of Karachi’s 40 union committees (UCs) have been released out of 246.
PPP emerged victorious on 23 UCs, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has secured 11, Jamat-e-Islami four while Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP) and Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam (JUI-F) claimed victory in one UC each.
Meanwhile, PTI suffered a setback in Karachi local bodies polls when Khurram Sher Zaman — who was considered the party’s candidate for the top slot of the mayor — lost to PPP’s Najmi Alam in Saddar. However, the initial results of the much-delayed local body election’s second phase in Karachi could not be finalised even past midnight despite the polling process ending at 5pm, political parties started claiming that “rigging is underway in the metropolis”.
The voting kicked off at 8am and continued uninterrupted, with reports of sporadic clashes. However, several confrontations were also reported even after the polling process ended.
The parties seemingly did not respond strongly to the clashes, however, later on, claims were made that the Sindh government and the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) were involved in delaying the release of results.
