(http://www.channelstv.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pakistan_protesters.jpg)(http://www.channelstv.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pakistan_protesters-300x187.jpg) (http://www.channelstv.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pakistan_protesters.jpg)Protests earlier Monday erupted across Pakistan as outrage grew over allegations of rampant election rigging in the just-concluded Pakistan election. Supporters of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan spilled onto the streets of most major cities after Khan, in a televised message from his hospital bed where he was recuperating after a fall during an election rally, said his party was preparing a White Paper against rigging allegations in Pakistan's recent poll. Hundreds of supporters - men, women and children - some wearing shirts with Khan's picture printed on them, rallied on Islamabad's Constitution Avenue. Saima Omar, Secretary-General of the women's wing of Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, said hundreds of thousands of Khan's supporters had turned out to vote for him, but their votes seemed to have disappeared. "In the Punjab, especially in Lahore, and in Sindh in Karachi, rigging went on openly and votes were changed. First they created a delay and then they carried out wrong counting," she told Reuters Television. Another protester said she was a polling agent during the election and had seen blatant rigging with her own eyes. In another part of the leafy capital, bearded men in white protested against the defeat of Maulana Ahmed Ludhianvi, a radical Sunni cleric and a hate figure for Shi'ites who accuse him of devoting his decades-long career to fomenting an escalating campaign of gun attacks and suicide bombings targeting their community. The prospect that Ludhianvi might win a place in the political mainstream at the May 11 vote horrifies Shi'ites who fear his presence in parliament will give him a much stronger platform to strike out at the sect. Khan's hectic anti-corruption and anti-US drone campaign electrified huge crowds in the weeks before the vote. But as returns trickled in over the weekend, it became increasingly apparent that his party would end up third behind former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N), and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of assassinated Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Via: ChannelsTV