Hundreds of people offered special prayers for Osama bin Laden in the populous southern Pakistani city of Karachi on Tuesday with organisers declaring the Al-Qaeda chief a martyr, police said. The event was called by Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a Pakistani charity on the US terror blacklist over its alleged links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the outlawed Kashmiri militant group India blames for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. JuD organised the gathering to honour bin Laden after his dramatic death in a US commando raid in Abbottabad, near the capital Islamabad. Carrying party flags and chanting anti-US slogans, the participants gathered on a road in the city's eastern district of Gulshan-e-Iqbal and offered Muslim funeral prayers for bin Laden, witnesses said.
Local police officer Saeed Ahmed said around 1 000 people took part in the prayers, some of them weeping, according to witnesses. Police and paramilitary troops were deployed but the crowd dispersed peacefully.