The MQM is based in Sindh province, with a membership mostly comprising the descendants of Urdu-speaking migrants to Pakistan at the time of the partition of British India in 1947.
BBC: Pakistan's MQM party shuts Karachi offices after attack
The peer is said to have told an Urdu-language broadcaster in Pakistan that he should have been sentenced by a magistrate but pressure had been placed on the courts to charge him with a more serious offence because of his support for Palestinians.
Senior security officials in Pakistan told the BBC Urdu Service that they had concluded their investigations into the memo in October this year, were confident that it had originated from the presidency but were unclear about how much President Asif Ali Zardari or Ambassador Haqqani had to do with it.
The Delhi-born son of an Urdu-speaking family that migrated to Pakistan after the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, Pervez Musharraf survived numerous assassination attempts and plots against him during his time in power.
"Some circles believe that the Indian consuls in Afghanistan, fully supported by the U.S., are creating mayhem and sabotaging peace in Pakistan, " wrote the Daily Express, an Urdu-lanaguage newspaper, in a June 30 editorial.
Radical opinions are casually expressed in Pakistan, by members of the English-speaking elite as well as the Urdu-speaking masses.
Its Voice of America radio broadcasts to Pakistan are hampered by obsolescent transmitters in Tajikistan and it has no TV broadcasts in Urdu or other native dialects.
Despite their proximity and the absence of a language barrier -- Hindustani, an amalgam of Hindi and Urdu, is understood by both north Indians and Pakistanis -- only 1.2% of Pakistan's exports go to India, while the import tally is a mere 0.7%.
Other neighbours in the Hashmi Colony area told BBC Urdu's Aijaz Mahar that the brothers posed as landlords from the fertile Charsadda area of north-western Pakistan who had moved to Abbottabad because of its pleasant climate.
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