Unfazed by the government crackdown, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has called for a shutdown in Sindh province on Sunday and a "long march" from Lahore to the capital to oppose President Pervez Musharraf's emergency rule, hours after authorities ended her house arrest.
The Pakistan People's Party called the bandh in Sindh, a stronghold of the party and the Bhutto family, to protest the "state's excesses against peaceful party workers" who were on Friday prevented from joining a rally against the emergency in Rawalpindi.
Several hundred policemen surrounded Zardari House, Bhutto's residence, on Friday and prevented the 54-year-old former premier from going to the nearby garrison city of Rawalpindi to lead the rally.
Hundreds of PPP workers, including women were also detained in the twin cities. Bhutto was freed from what the authorities described as "protective custody" late in the evening.
Officials said she had been asked to stay within her home as she faced a threat from suicide attackers who had entered Islamabad.
PPP leaders said they would go ahead with next week's march from Lahore to Islamabad that will traverse Punjab province, the stronghold of the ruling PML-Q, to press for the end of the emergency imposed on November 3.
Bhutto, whose detention in her home on Friday was condemned by Western powers, is also expected to meet diplomats in the capital to discuss the emergency and the political situation in Pakistan.
The police on Saturday said said Bhutto was free to go anywhere.
After attempting several times to break through the police cordon round her home, Bhutto addressed media and PPP workers from behind a barb wire barricade and repeated her demands that Musharraf quit as army chief and that general election be held by mid-January.
Bhutto said she was not satisfied by Musharraf's announcement that polls will be held by February 15, describing it as vague.
She demanded restoration of the constitution and fundamental rights and said any further crackdown on opposition activists would create an Iraq-like situation where Muslims are fighting each other.
Syed Qaim Ali Shah, the president of the Sindh unit of the PPP, has criticised the "regime's massive crackdown on the people" on Saturday and described it as "a knee jerk response of a paralysed regime".
Scores of PPP workers were arrested in places like Rawalpindi, Karachi and Peshawar to prevent them from joining the rally.
PPP activists retaliated by organising protests in Karachi, burning tyres and blocking roads in Pakistan's largest city.
The arrest of hundreds of PPP workers and detention of party MPs "by the regime to stop the people from attending the public meeting in Rawalpindi was new fascism which the PPP would not accept," he said.
He appealed to the people of Sindh to participate in protest demonstrations tomorrow "to send a powerful message to the regime that they would accept neither the usurpation of their rights nor any excesses against them".