Once adored for its stunning landscape, dancing peacocks, serene wilderness, tapestry of colourful traditional attire, melody of Mai Bhagi, swirling sand, fascinating temples and majestic sand dunes, Thar has now emerged as an axis of hunger, malnutrition, abject poverty and unrelenting deaths of children.
Tune in to any Sindhi tv channel and death toll in Thar with heart-rending footage marks every hourly bulletin.
The piling dead bodies were initially ascribed to a drought and famine that prompted sympathetic responses. The tragedy was considered as an isolated incident of the wrath of the nature, triggered by scant rainfall and an ensuing drought.
Many still consider Thar as a remote inaccessible territory. However, the reality on ground has drastically altered during recent years. The bewitching reservoir of Thar coal has converted Thar into a favourite destination of investors and officials. Metalled roads snake through the parched land, connecting major towns and randomly sprawled hamlets. The social fabric is going through a rapid jolt, leaving the local communities disarrayed.
Awaiting promised prosperity, the people of Thar are witnessing an unprecedented rise of religious outfits, frequent congregations of the faithful, sprawling seminaries and mosques. This social upheaval is eclipsing the once-cherished communal harmony that dominated the social landscape of Thar where faith never became a fault line.
An insidious shift in demography is another perilous phenomenon which is yet to unfold fully. Physical and digital connectivity of the area has extricated it from forlorn isolation, and distance is no more a pardonable excuse to justify unrelenting deaths.
In short, the socio-cultural and economic setting of Thar is going through a phenomenal shift that merits separate comprehensive research. The state and government exist with full tentacles in Thar and it is no more a desolate nature-dependent territory. In this context, the tormenting situation in Thar ought to be understood with a fresh approach.
Bad governance and pervasive administrative lapses multiply the impact of a natural shock not alien to the area otherwise.
Three recent reports unveiled a complex blend of administrative, social and political dimensions of this human tragedy. On the recommendation of Sindh High Court, the Sindh chief minister constituted a four-member commission to probe the Thar drought issue. Excerpts of a yet-to-be made public report provide an insight to the human-induced disaster.
The commission observed that there was a lack of coordination among the government’s departments for carrying out relief activities during drought. It also found huge coordination lapses among Town Municipal Administrations (TMAs), special initiative department, NGOs and public health departments. It also found that departments like social welfare, agriculture, environment, forest, population welfare, transport and tourism were underperforming.
The commission recommended setting up a provincial monitoring team having the representation of departments including health, food, livestock, irrigation and meteorology to report to the chief minister after every quarter. The drought commission called for preparing a comprehensive nutrition and drought policy and the related sectoral planning for issues ranging from poverty to education. The commission also found that local population had been excluded from reaping the fruits of development schemes, and urged the government to provide employment to the local population while excavating coal reserves.
Identifying an important administrative lapse, the report revealed that 309 posts of specialists, medical officers and others of BPS-17 to BPA-19 were lying vacant. The commission in its report stated that there were 14 ambulances in the entire district, out of which six were being used by the Mithi Civil Hospital. There is shortage of doctors in the hospitals in Thar. The commission also observed that doctors with domiciles of Thar were not willing to serve in the area and recommended the implementation of the Essential Services Act in letter and spirit.
Similar observations were echoed by the Chairman National Commission for Human Rights, Justice (Retd) Ali Nawaz Chohan. Presenting his report on Thar calamity, he lamented that the government of Sindh and its departments of health, education and local administration were responsible for the Thar tragedy.
Recently, appalling details were presented before the National Assembly Standing Committee on Human Rights. Members of the committee were told that 828 children had died in Thar over the past three years. Briefing the members of the committee, Fazila Aliani, a member of the committee from Balochistan, blamed corruption and lack of political will for the mounting deaths of children in Thar. Aliani further shared that the government decided to install 700 plants of reverse osmosis (water purification) but only 432 were installed and a number of them have become out of order.
The Senate’s committee was astounded while hearing from the Sindh government’s representative that the provincial government has spent more than 10 billion rupees during the last three years on public welfare. The situation on ground is different and one can hardly trace a fraction of the spending.
These reports show the political and administrative collapse in Thar that has intensified the impact of a natural calamity. A chronic deficit of human development and administrative neglect by successive governments has culminated in total chaos.
Droughts are not new to Thar. The Sindh Relief Department’s official data reveals that Thar witnessed five severe droughts, eight moderate and 11 mild droughts since 1965. Each time a fleeting response to the situation allowed it to perpetuate since the root causes were never addressed. Every drought was treated as an isolated episode and an integrated long term remedy was never contemplated. Free distribution of wheat was used as a magic wand to end the miseries of Tharis.
Seasonal migration has become an annual feature for the Thari community due to famine. The socio-economic indicators of Thar narrate the accumulated development deficit of the area.
An official document “Millennium Development Goals Report-2013” ranked Tharparkar as the second last in fully immunised children among the 23 districts of the province where 56 per cent children did not receive any immunisation doze. Similarly, the district was 20th out of the 23 districts on immunisation of children against measles, which shows only 61.7 per cent coverage. The district had 6th highest number of under five-year children who suffer from diarrhea. Only 13.6 per cent births were attended by skilled birth-attendants placing the district in the bottom within the province. Concomitant to that just 44.6 per cent pregnant women received antenatal care consultation.
According to the report, the district was the last on access to improved sources of drinking water and sanitation with only 17.2 and 7 per cent coverage.
The government of Sindh has shown little seriousness in addressing the root causes. Laying reverse-osmosis water treatment plants is being obsessively pursued. The idea was not bad had it been done with proper homework and due diligence. Plagued with customary malpractices, the project is set to become another scam marked with embezzlements and nepotism.
Thar does not need ephemeral charitable solutions it needs a well-meditated multi-sectoral long term strategy. One such promising project is extending Raini canal to Thar. The canal with the design discharge of 10,000 cusecs is currently under construction. The project has a design provision of an off-taking Thar canal with a capacity of 5000 cusecs.
The Sindh government has been spending billions of rupees on the lining of selected reaches of canals for inexplicable reasons. This amount can be diverted for betterment of millions of hapless communities of Thar. An immediate construction of Thar Canal can bring dramatic changes in the lives of Tharis.
Saad Aziz (Credit: ISPR)It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F.
Two of Aziz’s associates, he says, “were just roaming around in the vicinity of T2F”. A third was keeping an eye on the street outside. Aziz himself was riding a motorcycle driven by one Aliur Rehman, also mentioned as Tony in the police record. When he received the message that Mahmud had left T2F, he says, he followed her. “Suzuki Swift, AWH 541,” he repeats her car’s make and registration number.
As the car stopped at a signal less than 500 metres to the north of T2F, “Tony rode up alongside it.” Mahmud was in the driving seat, Aziz says. “Next to her was her mother, I think. That is what we found out from the news later. There was a man sitting in the back. I fired the gun four or five times at her.”
“There wasn’t one particular reason to target her; she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.”
Sitting in a sparsely furnished room within Karachi Police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Aziz appears at ease even in blindfold. Recounting the events of that evening, he never sounds hurried or under duress.
After shooting Mahmud, he says he and Tony turned left from the signal towards Punjab Chowrangi and reached Sharae-e-Faisal, crossing Teen Talwar in Clifton on their way. While still on the motorcycle, he messaged others to get back to Tariq Road. Once there, he just picked up his motorcycle and they all dispersed. “We only got confirmation of her death later from the news,” he says. “At that moment [of shooting], there is no way of confirming if the person is dead. You just do it and get out of there.”
It was on February 13, 2015, when he says he decided that Mahmud had to die. That evening, he was at T2F, attending an event, The Karachi “Situation”: Exploring Responses. “It was something she said during the talk,” he recalls. “That we shouldn’t be afraid of the Taliban, we should stand up to them, demonstrate against them, something like that. That is when we made up our minds.” Later in the conversation, though, he adds, “There wasn’t one particular reason to target her: she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.” He laughs softly, almost bashfully, as he mentions the last.
Aziz remembers visiting The Karachi “Situation” seminar with Tony who, the police say, remains on the run. Pictures and video footage of the event show Aziz sitting at the end of a row, close to the entrance. Next to him is Tony, a round-faced young man with a dark complexion. The police say he is an engineering graduate from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Rawalpindi campus. “Tony had a Twitter account under a fake name and he used to follow Sabeen’s tweets very closely,” says Aziz. He also mentions another source of information. “About four weeks [after the discussion on Karachi], when I got emails about events being held there, I sent Tony there a few times to check if her car was there. It wasn’t.”
On April 24, 2015, Aziz says, he told Tony to go there again. “When he confirmed her car was there, we made the plan there and then.”
By that time, he confesses, he had taken part in 20 major and minor “operations” in Karachi. These include an attack – just eight days before Mahmud’s assassination – on American academic Debra Lobo, who taught at a college in Karachi, bank heists to put together money for their hit-and-run activities, multiple attempts to target the police and the Rangers and grenade attacks on co-education schools in Gulshan-e-Iqbal (on February 3, 2015) and North Nazimabad (on March 18, 2015).
Nineteen days after Mahmud’s murder, Aziz says he took part in an attack that elicited worldwide shock and condemnation: the assassination of 43 members of the Ismaili Shia community, including women and children, travelling in a bus in the Safoora Goth area on the outskirts of Karachi.
Aziz appears as a mild-mannered young man of medium height and build, with a trimmed beard. He makes a little joke about how he can instantly tell which law enforcement or intelligence agency the person asking him questions belongs to. “The first thing the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] want to know is whether there are any links with RAW [the Indian intelligence agency]; CID is interested in the funding aspect; and the police keep hammering on about what other wardaat (hits) we’ve been involved in.”
Aziz calls himself a Salafi, though his father says the family follows Sunni, not Salafi, Islam. When an interrogator asks him why he and his associates targeted Ismaili Shias, he cites their sectarian affiliation as the reason. “It is perfectly acceptable to take the lives of women and children for that reason.”
Aziz’s radicalisation began in 2009, following a visit to Saudi Arabia for umrah with his family. Upon his return to Pakistan, he decided to read translations of the Quran. “Until then I had only read it once in Arabic.” (One investigator, however, reports that Aziz could not recite certain Quranic verses that every practising Muslim recites at least once a day during Isha prayers.)
For a while, he joined the Tableeghi Jamaat. Then, he took to attending lectures by a scholar, Shaykh Kamaluddin Ahmed, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums) at the time, whose Sufi interpretation of Islam is distinct from what the Tableeghi Jamaat stands for. “But neither [Ahmed] nor Tableeghi Jamaat even discussed jihad,” he says. “It was over time, primarily through reading the Quran, that I developed an inclination towards jihad.”
Aziz then met Tony, whom he suspected had contacts with militants. Tony made him wait for some time before introducing him to one Haris, an al-Qaeda operative. “[Haris] was heading al-Qaeda’s daawati (recruitment) wing for Pakistan at the time. I joined this wing at the end of 2010,” says Aziz.
In September 2013, Haris, whose real name is said to be Abu Zar, was arrested from a hostel of the Punjab University in Lahore, along with two others, for alleged links with al-Qaeda. In the last 22 months, the authorities have not produced him in any court of law for a trial. Police sources in Lahore say Haris and his associates are in ISI’s custody. This information, however, could not be confirmed through other sources.
In 2011, Aziz went to Waziristan for training where, he says, he was attached to a group headed by Ahmad Farooq, deputy head of al-Qaeda in the subcontinent and a former student of Punjab University. (Farooq was killed in an American drone strike in January 2015 in North Waziristan.)
By 2013, Aziz says he was disillusioned and frustrated. Instead of allowing him take part in terrorist operations, his handler Haris limited him to media duties — such as managing online jihadist publications. “In mid-2013, I met Haider Abbas,” says Aziz. Abbas introduced him to Tahir Minhas alias Saeen, identified by the police as a member of al-Qaeda.
As a senior, experienced commander, Minhas set the ground rules for the group that Aziz joined. “We all used aliases; I only know Tony by his real name,” says Aziz. He got his own alias — Tin Tin. “None of us would ask for the members’ real names, addresses or anything that could identify them in case one of us was arrested. That was on Minhas’s instructions.”
The cell had no designated ‘safe house’ to meet. Minhas often called its members for meetings to Jan Japan Motors, a car auction site on the Super Highway. He also selected the targets. The attack on Mahmud, though, was different. Aziz says it was on his own initiative. “Tahir wasn’t even there that day.”
In 2014, the sudden ascendancy of the Islamic State (IS) and its territorial gains in Iraq and Syria became a lightning rod for militants across the globe. In January this year, IS announced its expansion into Khorasan, a historical region comprising parts of present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and some Central Asian countries. Several factions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) immediately joined it.
“We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda.”
“Among my acquaintances there was already a lot of discussion about the merits of al-Qaeda and Daesh [the Arabic acronym for IS]. Many of us felt that al-Qaeda was reduced to mainly talk and little action,” Aziz says. “We were in Waziristan when the creation of the [IS’s] Khorasan [chapter] was announced, and we pledged loyalty to its emir, [former TTP commander] Hafiz Saeed Khan.” (A senior official of the Intelligence Bureau in Peshawar says Khan was “in Tor Dara area in Khyber Agency’s Tirah valley in January 2015”, the time period to which Aziz refers.)
Subsequently, he says, some of his associates did pro-IS wall chalking and left propaganda pamphlets in parts of Karachi, especially at the scenes of some of the attacks they carried out. Some of the people working with him, he claims, have gone to Syria as part of an effort to strengthen their connection with the IS leadership there.
Weeks after Mahmud’s murder, Jaadu, her white Persian cat, would sit expectantly by the door of her house for hours every evening, waiting for a familiar footfall on the steps outside. Inside, her mother, Mahenaz Mahmud, sits on a chair looking like her daughter might have 20 years in the future — had she had that much time. The mother also exudes the same warmth, intelligence and artlessness as the daughter — and, since Mahmud’s death, a stoicism that would move a stone to tears.
“On April 24, Sabeen made breakfast for us (Mahenaz and Mahenaz’s mother) as usual. That was her routine. She would switch on the kettle, run to her computer, then she would put the bread in the toaster,” Mahenaz recalls with a chuckle. “She didn’t want me to have a cold slice, so she would toast the second slice only after I had finished the first.” They would usually chat away during breakfasts. “We would talk about all kinds of things.” Sometimes, Mahmud would seek her mother’s advice. “She would ask me what I thought of something being done at T2F. Sometimes we would flog some philosophical concept. We would share articles, then discuss them… there was lots that we talked about.”
That day, though, Mahenaz sensed something unusual. “I don’t know whether it was anxiety but there was some element about this Baloch missing people event, especially because of the talk that was cancelled at LUMS [under orders from the ISI],” she says. Mahmud was not moderating the session; she hadn’t even organised it. “Someone else wanted to do it and she had agreed to provide the space,” says Mahenaz. “But she talked to some people about it and then said to me “It’ll be ok, Amma””.
After breakfast, the mother went to work – she is an academic programmes advisor at a teacher training institute – but planned to attend the talk on the Baloch missing persons. “I hadn’t been to any event for a long time because I get quite exhausted by the evening but that day I had a very strong feeling that I must be around her.”
Following the event, around 9pm, Mahmud was planning to drop her mother home, pick up a friend and go to another friend’s place for dinner. “When Sabeen came out [of T2F], I remember she was in a hurry, and she told the driver to sit in the back. I got in the seat next to her and we drove off.”
A short distance away, the Sunset Boulevard traffic signal turned red and their car came to a stop. “It is impossible for me to process those five, 10 seconds,” Mahenaz says quietly. “I was talking to Sabeen, and my face was turned towards her. She was looking in front. A motorcycle came up along the side she was sitting, much too close for comfort. My eyes became riveted on a gun in someone’s hand. I said to Sabeen, “What do you think he wants? He’s got a gun.” I thought it was a mugging. All this must have taken only three or four seconds. Then the window shattered, and Sabeen’s head just tilted to one side; her eyes were open. There was not a moan, not a groan, not a whimper. Then pandemonium broke out around us.”
Mahmud was shot five times. Her mother also took two bullets: one in her back and another that, after going through Mahmud’s body, went into her arm and out again. She says she remembers feeling there was something “happening with my body but I wasn’t sure what.” She was too focussed on her daughter to be sure of anything else. “I was saying ‘Sabeen talk to me, give me some indication that you can hear what I am saying.’ Even though I knew that she had gone, somewhere there was a glimmer of hope.”
She herself was taken to the Aga Khan University Hospital for treatment. “Next morning, I started demanding that I wanted to go home. I was told that Sabeen’s body was being kept in a morgue and I thought she should be put on the way to her last journey immediately.” With a bullet still lodged in her back, she left the hospital to bury her only child.
When Mahenaz Mahmud learnt that the police had arrested some educated young men for carrying out the murder, it was a shock to her, almost a betrayal of some of her most closely held convictions. “I felt terrified. I am a person who teaches my students that we all have our biases and that we put people into boxes because we don’t have time to find out about each and every person.”
In the third week of June, T2F organised a qawwali session to celebrate her daughter’s birthday posthumously. While observing the audience from the back of the room, she couldn’t shake off a nagging thought. “I was looking at the young boys in the audience and wondering, ‘So what are they thinking? What is really going on in their head?’ Normally I wouldn’t have thought that about young people. I would be happy that all kinds of young people come to T2F. Now I am really scared about how these young men’s minds can be messed with.”
The senselessness of the murder is difficult for her to process. “I want to ask them, why? What happened to you? What was it that bothered you about Sabeen? Was it something she stood for? Did you just want to make an example out of her? Did you think that taking a human life is such a small matter? But then I realise that these people think very differently. Their paradigms are different. Their schemas are different.”
In another part of Karachi, sitting in her home studio, architect Marvi Mazhar, one of Mahmud’s closest friends, says: “I always knew. I always thought that if someone gets to her, it’ll be someone educated. Sabeen had to deal with a lot of hate speech, and from people who were all educated. They used to write, they used to tweet, they were all very tech-savvy. Every time she’d complain that these young bachas, I wish I could have chai with them, talk to them.”
Mazhar recalls an incident from last November. At the Creative Karachi Festival organised by T2F, the azan went unnoticed for a few moments in the hubbub and a young man angrily demanded that the music be stopped instantly. “Sabeen went up to the guy, took him aside and spoke to him for a while; a little later, he actually brought flowers for her by way of apology. There was this strange magic about her,” she says with a wistful smile.
In the days leading up to her death, Mahmud was particularly restless, says Mazhar. On Tuesday, April 21, there was a get-together of friends at Mazhar’s place where Mahmud was “a little agitated”. Mazhar heard her saying to someone on the phone, “If we are not going to do it now, then we won’t do it because after that I am leaving for London and I don’t have time.” She assumes this was about the talk on Baloch missing persons. “Her heart was not into this talk, mainly because she had so much going on otherwise. She believed in it, she believed that the Baloch must be given a platform. But, I felt, judging from the conversations I have had with her, she was waiting for a signal, waiting for someone to tell her not to do this.”
A sturdy metal barrier bars entry into a rough stretch at the end of Beaumont Road in Karachi’s Civil Lines. Only a few street lights illuminate the area; that, along with the dilapidated condition of the road, is perhaps deliberate, designed to make things a little more difficult for terrorists looking to target the CID headquarters that looms up on the right, after the barrier. They did exactly that on November 10, 2010, killing at least 17 people and injuring over 100 in a massive truck bombing. Access inside the CID premises now lies behind a raft of concrete barriers, designed to minimise the possibility of another attack.
Raja Umar Khattab, Senior Superintendent Police, strides into his office at around 10.30pm after taraweeh prayers. A stocky, barrel-chested man, he is wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with khaki pants, rolled up at the bottom and rubber slippers. He speaks in rapid-fire sentences; names of terrorists roll off his tongue like those of old acquaintances. Several phone calls interrupt conversation; a senior official has misplaced his cell phone and Khattab is trying to get it traced. “Sir, don’t worry. I’ll make sure it is back with you soon,” he says reassuringly.
As the CID’s lead investigator, Khattab is flushed with pride over the recent arrest of what he calls a major terrorist cell. He has no doubt the police under him have the men who killed Mahmud and committed the Safoora Goth massacre, apart from various other crimes.
Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation.
The Sindh Rangers, too, have made a separate claim of arresting a mastermind of the attack on Ismaili Shias. “He has nothing to do with Safoora Goth incident; he never did,” says Khattab, shaking his head vigorously, when asked about the man arrested by the Rangers and reportedly linked to the detained office-bearers of the Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society. “When you go to a court to seek remand, you put in extra things. Otherwise it can get difficult to get a remand,” is how he explains the reason for the claim made by the Rangers.
More importantly, Aziz’s claim about his allegiance with IS meets with a similarly dismissive response. “We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda,” says Khattab.
“And why should it be so surprising that these terrorists are so educated? There were always educated people in al-Qaeda. Educated people don’t join TTP. It is the madrasa-educated ones who join TTP. They have the desire for jihad but these [educated jihadis] are ideologues. They envision grander things,” he adds. And for that reason, Khattab states, they are far more dangerous: They can be anywhere — the shopping mall, the university, saying their prayers beside you.
Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation. “He became disillusioned with worldly pursuits,” says the police officer. “When he joined Unilever for an internship [in the second half of 2010], he met Aliur Rehman – alias Tony – who was also working there.” Tony, a member of Dr Israr Ahmed’s Lahore-based Islamic movement, Tanzeem-e-Islami, was to play a vital role in Aziz’s radicalisation, inspiring him to fight for a Muslim caliphate, says the police officer.
But it was Minhas, the police claim, who turned Aziz into what he has become. In Khattab’s words: “Saad says Tahir motivated him so much that he no longer has any fear of killing people. His role in targeted killings was that of the shooter; by my reckoning, he has killed about 20 people.”
CID officials maintain that the terrorist group of which Aziz was a member had split from a larger al-Qaeda formation eight to 10 months ago. “While Tahir is its askari (militant) commander, he in turn answers to Abdullah Yousuf, who is in Helmand, Afghanistan. The other group formed by this rupture is led by Haji Sahib, Ramzi Yousef’s older brother,” says Khattab. He believes the crime spree by Aziz’s group, which hadn’t yet given itself a name, was aimed at raising its profile within the terrorist fraternity so that someone “owned” it.
Tracking down the group, he says, was not easy. They operated under aliases, did not use mobile phones and, instead, employed a Wi-Fi-based application called Talkray to communicate. The CID first picked up their trail sometime in 2014 through some men who were in prison, Khattab says. Based on the information obtained from them – he does not quite elaborate how but only says “we did some working on them” – the police picked up two former Karachi University students who had joined al-Qaeda through contacts at the campus and whose job was to maintain the organisation’s website. “We soon figured out that there is a network of educated al-Qaeda members in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and other areas around Karachi University,” he says.
The clues led the police to a sports teacher at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, who had set up a laboratory in his house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal where, along with his son and nephew, he used to teach young men to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices. The police also found a lot of written material that led them to conclude that a large al-Qaeda group was active in Karachi. “We found out it had two wings — one askari and one daawati.” The police do not divulge whether or not they have arrested and interrogated the teacher or, for that matter, any other details about his identity and whereabouts.
While investigating the people arrested earlier, the police learnt that Minhas was the group’s commander. Born in a village in the Jhelum district of Punjab, Minhas is a resident of Kotri, near Hyderabad, and has been in and out of police’s hands since 2007. According to an official source, one looking very closely into the massacre of Ismaili Shias, Minhas, (a matriculate, according to this source), had a thriving poultry business in Kotri at one point. He is also, says the same source, rabidly anti-Shia and has been a member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned organisation involved in hundreds of acts of sectarian and religious terrorism.
Khattab and his team of investigators describe Minhas as a highly sophisticated militant, with his own signature style. They claim to have discovered important similarities in the terrorist activities he has carried out: in all of these, silencer-fitted imported Glock, Caracal and Stoeger pistols are used; he and his associates always hit their targets in the head. “By the time the Safoora Goth massacre happened, we had gathered lots of little clues,” says Khattab.
Some other clues materialised in September 2014 after a suspect named Amir Abbas managed to escape during an encounter with the police but his wife was injured and arrested. “We found plenty of incriminating material at his house and worked on it quietly from September [2014] to April [2015], matching and cross matching the evidence,” says Khattab.
This finally led to the arrest of Minhas and his associates, including Aziz. “When we recovered their laptops, their browsing history helped us connect them to other cases. “Had we been even one day late, all these boys would have left Karachi for Quetta, Waziristan etc.”
The CID officers also show what they call a hit list. These are A-4 size prints, carrying no information about their senders and receivers, but complete with photos and addresses of the targets, which include naval officers, intelligence agency personnel, police officers, showbiz personalities, journalists, workers of non-government organisations and three fashion designers. In some cases, the prints also carry details of the targets’ daily routine. When asked why the group wanted to target fashion designers, Aziz is quoted by Khattab to have said, “You kill three. No one will design sleeveless clothes again.”
At a distance from the police’s neatly tied narration, events take a rather mysterious turn. A former academic at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) who once taught Aziz, and who has since moved to Europe, recalls his student as “being extremely close to [an intelligence agency]”. In April 2014, this academic needed a police clearance report for some work. Having tried unsuccessfully for a week to obtain it, he asked Aziz for help. “He told me it was no problem, and that he could get it for me in 10 minutes. He was wrong; it took him an hour.” This alleged link, however, could not be verified through any other source.
Aziz’s purported reasons for having targeted Mahmud are also rather mystifying. Many Pakistanis, weary of having their lives held to ransom by rampant militancy, make anti-Taliban statements the way she made at the talk on the Karachi situation. And on February 14 this year, Aziz’s restaurant had a promotional offer targeted at customers and their “loved ones” — complete with the image of two hearts placed right next to each other. Isn’t this just another way of saying pyaar ho jaane do? His account of planning her murder also mixes up a few details. He states that Tony was unable to spot Mahmud’s car outside T2F between the February 13 talk on Karachi and the April 24 discussion on Baloch missing persons. (Mahmud did leave Karachi on February 19 for an overseas trip and returned on March 5. She briefly went out of the country again from March 25 to April 5.) Between her arrival from abroad and her assassination, there were at least five events at T2F and she was also attending to her office work at T2F every day during this period. Can, then, her murder precisely on the day of Unsilencing Balochistan: Take Two be seen as purely a coincidence?
Whatever the motivation behind his actions – whether he is serving the ends of as-yet unknown masters or assuaging his own desire to ‘right’ society’s moral compass – his confession suggests that he is part of a cell carrying out orders issued by a central command structure. This is particularly evident in the Safoora Goth incident: an attack of that size and precision cannot be carried out by a motley group of like-minded individuals.
While Aziz has been singing in police custody, his confession may not stand the test of a trial in a court of law. Confessions before the police or a JIT, or any executive authority for that matter, have no legal standing. “[Only] a confession before a judicial magistrate has legal sanctity because a judge is an independent authority,” says Karachi-based lawyer Faisal Siddiqi. “A judge is not part of the investigation so he has no vested interest [in its outcome].”
Without independently verifiable evidence, it is virtually impossible to successfully prosecute any accused on the basis of their confessions alone. Ajmal Pahari, an alleged target killer, for instance, was acquitted in 2011 notwithstanding his on-camera confession of having committed over 100 murders. (He was soon re-arrested on additional murder charges, however, and is currently behind bars.) Aziz shows little concern about his trial and punishment when asked about his future. “What are my plans now?” he says completely unfazed, and laughing slowly. “We’ll go to prison, but we’ll break out of there. Then, we’ll make plans.”
Arms supply route in Punjab (Credit: dawn.com)MULTAN, April 22: The Punjab Home Department has constituted a joint investigation team to probe Chotu Gang into abduction and killing of police personnel, which invited military intervention in the operation across the riverine area of River Indus
The JIT is constituted under Section 19 of the Anti Terrorism Act 1997 to finalise the investigation in the case (FIR No 47/16) registered under sections 302/ 324/ 395/ 353/ 186/ 148/ 149 of PPC, 3/4 ESA and 7-ATA registered with Rajanpur’s Bangla Achha Police Station.
The Home Department circular says the JIT would comprise five officials including a convener and four members. DG Khan DPO Capt Atta Muhammad would head the JIT with Bahawalpur Counter Terrorism Department DSP Aftabullah, one representative each from ISI and Military Intelligence, and Bangla Achha SHO Pervaiz Akhtar.
The Home Department has requested Punjab CTD Additional IG and sector commanders of ISI and MI for deputing special representatives for the JIT.
Security sources confided to The News that revelations were expected in coming days regarding politicians’ involvement in patronising and protecting the gang. They predicted that the JIT would ascertain the Indian arms smuggling chain, which operates from Cholistan across Pak-India border.
The security sources believed that Chhotu tried to mislead by claiming that he had purchased arms from Afghanistan. The Indian weapon smuggling was easier and safer from Cholistan then Afghanistan, as the arms smugglers were infiltrating from Jaisalmer into Cholistan.
According to the sources, the arms’ supply chain travels from Cholistan to the River Indus’ riverine areas and then further proceeding to Sindh and Balochistan. The Baloch separatists are receiving Indian arms from this route.
The sources said the JIT could investigate linkages between the Chhotu Gang and political elite to establish political backing the gangsters had been enjoying. The JIT might also establish connections between the Chhotu Gang and sectarian outfits particularly Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
The Chhotu Gang had abducted eight policemen in 2013 and demanded release of four high-profile LeJ operatives in exchange. The Basti Malok police of Multan were investigating the LeJ operatives involved in bomb blasts in Balochistan and other terrorism incidents across the country.
The JIT may also review the political pressure into the release of LeJ operatives in exchange of the kidnapped policemen.
Ghulam Rasool & gang (Credit: pakistankakhudahafiz.com)Ghulam Rasool alias Chotoo, the ringleader of the Chotoo gang, against whom security forces have launched a major operation, worked as a security guard for MPA Atif Mazari for three to five years in Rojhan, according to police officials.
He also worked for the Punjab police as an informer till 2007 and used to inform police about gangs involved in robberies and kidnapping for ransom in Rajanpur and Muzaffargarh districts.
According to locals and police, Chotoo belongs to Bakrani clan of Mazari tribe of Rojhan area. He later developed differences with police over unknown reasons and established his own gang to carry out criminal activities.
Some small and prominent gangs operating in Rojhan, Dera Ghazi Khan and adjoining districts of Sindh and Balochistan also joined the Chotoo gang. They include Bilal alias Bilali Jaakha, Baba Long, Gumani Gopang, Sindhi group, Bosans of Muzaffargrah and Khalid Kajlani.
The Bilali Jaakha gang was formed by two brothers — Bilal Jaakha and Jugnu Jaakha. They are said to be implicated in a fake case for killing two sisters of Gopang tribe of Rajanpur. It is said the women were killed by their tribe but it implicated the Jaakha brothers in the case because of an old enmity.
The two brothers were reportedly acquitted of the murder charge by a court. During their time in jail they developed links with criminals and after their release killed their ‘enemies’ and joined the Chotoo gang.
The criminals who were declared proclaimed offenders in different areas of south Punjab and Sindh used to take shelter in localities under the control of Chotoo.
The small gangs, after kidnapping businessmen and professionals from areas as far as Karachi, Balochistan and Rahimyar Khan, sell them to Chotoo for Rs400,000 to Rs500,000. A former fugitive who had spent more than a year with the Chotoo gang said Chotoo got bigger ransom amount for their release.
The Punjab police have so far carried out six to seven operations against the Chotoo gang and lost at least 30 policemen. Some gangsters were also killed.
The riverine area of Kachi Jamal in Rajanpur, a stronghold of the Chotoo gang, has a population of more than 10,000 people living in small villages. They depend mostly on rearing animals and farming. Chotoo is known for helping the locals and never carried out any criminal activity in the area. But he made it a no-go area for police who found it almost impossible to get information about him from the locals.
Earlier, the Bosan gang headed by Zafar Bosan and Tariq Bosan were the uncrowned rulers of the area till 2003-04. They were later eliminated by police.
The biggest operation carried out by Rajanpur and Rahimyar Khan police against the Chotoo gang was in 2010 which continued for three months, but to no avail. The last operation was conducted in 2013.
During an operation in Kotla Mughlan area of Rajanpur some years ago, police, however, succeeded in recovering a doctor from the gang and killing a gangster.
CURRENT OPERATION: Local police wanted to carry out the operation against the Chotoo gang in a careful manner, cordoning off the area by setting up checkposts and bunkers nearby, slowly closing in on the outlaws.
But Punjab IG Mushtaq Sukhera was in a hurry.
According to a police officer who was onboard a boat which came under attack by the Chotoo gang on April 13, the local police opposed the way the IG wanted to carry out the operation.
They told him that the gang had more sophisticated weapons and capacity than police and only the army could counter them. But the IG said the Punjab government didn’t want to involve the army in the matter as it was against its policy.
The officer said that when the police refused to attack the gang without any proper planning and sought some time, the IG dared them, saying he would himself go to the riverine area if they didn’t.
At this, regional and district police officers begged their subordinates to save their prestige.
“Policemen in two boats moved into the area along both banks of the river. The boats came under attack. One of them was captured by the gangsters and the other in which I was got fired on,” the officer said, adding that police returned fire and killed two gangsters.
Four policemen were killed during the gunbattle, while another succumbed to his injuries in a hospital.
Surprisingly, the ground operation was being led by SHOs, though all senior officials, including DSPs, SPs, DPOs, RPOs and the IG, were present there.
When Chotoo came to know that an SHO was among the captured policemen, he separated him from other captives and shot him dead on the spot.
Due to haste and flawed planning of the IG, seven policemen have lost their lives while 27 others are still in captivity of the gangsters.
Chottu is an enterprising individual. He operates out of his Corporate Headquarters in Kacha Jamal area of Rajan Pur forest. He was a petty thief in 1987. He is now the Chief Executive of a private militia which can easily take on the entire police force of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In an an-going encounter that has already lasted about 2 weeks, he has killed 7 and captured 25 policemen. The police in Pakistan, trained only to protect the ruling elite is not used to fighting criminals. It must therefore now look up to either Army or Allah for help.
We have buried our heads in the sand, never admitting the existence of hundreds of ‘Chottus’ and ‘Barrus’. Both plunder the poor of Pakistan. The ‘Chottus’ seek refuge in domestic sanctuaries while the ‘Barrus’ invest in off-shore companies. They operate their private militias and control their autonomous territories. They have been allowed to grow into such formidable militant entities despite Article 256 of the Constitution, which categorically states that ‘no private organisation capable of functioning as a military organisation shall be formed and any such organisation shall be illegal’.
It is not wise to first allow a problem to grow into the size of a monster and then be forced to undertake huge expeditions, ‘Zarb-e-Aahan’ being the latest of the series.
What stops the government to launch a ‘Zarb-e-Aman’, that should begin by a proactive demand for surrender of all weapons and abolition of all private militias. Must we remain endlessly engaged in reactionary conflicts and become voluntary hostages to the ‘Chottus’ and the ‘Barrus’ of our own creation.
In the year since Pakistani investigators raided Axact, a Karachi-based software company accused of raking in hundreds of millions of dollars with a vast Internet degree scam, Pakistani and American investigators have been busy dismantling its operations.
Fourteen Axact employees, including the chief executive, await trial on charges of fraud, extortion and money laundering. Bank accounts in Pakistan and the United States have been frozen. Investigators have uncovered a tangled web of corporate entities — dozens of shell companies and associates, from Caribbean tax havens to others in Delaware, Dubai and Singapore — used to funnel illicit earnings back to Pakistan.
New details suggest that Axact’s fraud empire, already considered one of the biggest Internet scams on record, is bigger than initially imagined. Over the past decade, Axact took money from at least 215,000 people in 197 countries — one-third of them from the United States. Sales agents wielded threats and false promises and impersonated government officials, earning the company at least $89 million in its final year of operation.
Those findings stem from financial and customer records, company registrations, sworn testimony, communications between Pakistani and American officials, and hundreds of hours of taped phone conversations filed in court. The records have been made available to The New York Times in the months since a Times article detailing the company’s scheme prompted police raids and the collapse not just of Axact, but also of the company’s new national news channel, Bol.
The case against Axact, which at first seemed a rare instance in which tycoons with powerful connections were being held to criminal account, has increasingly appeared in recent months to be in jeopardy.
The leading prosecutor quit with little explanation, hinting that he had come under political pressure to soft-pedal the case. A trial date for the company’s executives has not been set, and several judges have dropped out of the case. Some media analysts, noting that Axact’s jailed chief executive, Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh, has publicly boasted of his work for the Pakistani military, speculate that his powerful connections may yet work in his favor.
“There’s been a huge amount of speculation and analysis and deep-throated conspiracy theories,” said Hasan Zaidi, a filmmaker and media analyst based in Karachi.
Axact had been in business for nearly 10 years at the time of the arrests in May, and the company and its founder appeared ever more eager to step into the public spotlight, seemingly unconcerned about the risk. Most prominently, Axact was preparing to introduce Bol, a television network with 2,200 employees that had started test transmissions in the days before the police raids.
Comparing himself to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Mr. Shaikh had touted Axact as Pakistan’s leading software exporter. He laid out an ambitious plan to provide education for millions of Pakistani children, and he wreathed himself in patriotism: In the corner of his office, near a passage leading to a bedroom and a private swimming pool, the eagle-crested Axact company flag stood alongside a furled Pakistani standard.
Once the police investigation began, Mr. Shaikh instructed subordinates to burn company documents at a vacant lot and to destroy computer drives, some of which were later cast into the sea, another executive testified to the police.
But Mr. Shaikh could not prevent the seizure of a vast trove of data, some recovered from computer disks as they were being deleted, that led investigators to conclude that Axact’s main business was providing fake degrees.
The police found more than one million blank educational certificates and evidence of 300 fictitious educational websites, many with American-sounding names like Columbiana and Brooklyn Park, that sold fake degrees to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Some knowingly bought effortless degrees to pad résumés or to help in immigration, and a handful have been publicly embarrassed.
Many other customers, investigators quickly realized, had fallen victim to an elaborate and aggressive fraud, going to Axact-run websites for a legitimate online education only to be intimidated into making ever larger payments.
Hundreds of hours of taped phone conversations, extracted from Axact servers and cited by prosecutors, showed sales agents impersonating American lawyers or State Department officials in an effort to collect more money from customers, mostly in the Middle East.
The television network Bol, owned by Axact, was conducting transmission tests when the raids took place and was shuttered as a result of the case.
In one recording from 2014, Riaz Ahmed Shaikh, a Pakistani living in Abu Dhabi, pleaded for respite from “Jacob” — a man who he believed was calling from the legal office of a university in California but was in fact an Axact sales agent in Karachi, according to police records.
“Please, please, Mr. Jacob,” said Mr. Shaikh, who said he had already paid $150,000 to Axact. “I have sold all of my assets to pay this last amount. I am not eating well. I am not sleeping well.”
“Look, you’re not paying that much,” the sales agent cajoled, before holding out a threat of possible police action. “Just another $10,000.”
Axact executives took extraordinary measures to disguise their links to fraud. In a lawsuit in the United States, in which former customers of the online Belford High School were seeking damages, Axact officials persuaded an attendant in the company’s cafeteria to pose as the founder of the school, a police report said.
The worker, Salem Kureshi, conducted a webcam video deposition in 2011 for the American court. In it, he merely moved his lips while, off camera, an Axact official voiced a set of evasive answers for the American lawyers, Mr. Kureshi told the police.
After the police raided Axact last year, Mr. Kureshi added, executives paid him $250 to go into hiding in his hometown, 700 miles from Karachi.
In Pakistan, the plight of Axact’s victims has been largely overshadowed by the media furor surrounding the Bol network, which had hired some of the country’s most prominent journalists before it closed. With their salaries suddenly cut off, many employees took to the streets to protest, saying Axact was the victim of a conspiracy by rival news organizations.
Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh insists that he earned his wealth through legitimate software exports. He has hired Shaukat Hayat, a lawyer whose client list includes Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistan president, to defend him.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Hayat said the case against Mr. Shaikh and his fellow executives had been cooked up by the news media. “They have not committed any illegal action,” he said.
Mr. Shaikh also faces scrutiny from American investigators. In a letter to the Pakistani authorities in February, United States officials said the F.B.I. had identified Axact as a “diploma mill” that operated a “worldwide web of shell companies and associates.” Three of the main shell companies, registered in Delaware, were found to have been owned by Mr. Shaikh or his associates, the letter said.
Other company documents point to shell holdings in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Dubai and Panama. In several instances, Mr. Shaikh appears to have used a pseudonym, Ryan Jones, to sign company documents. He became a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis, a small Caribbean island that sells passports to rich investors.
In the Belford case, lawyers have obtained a court order freezing three American bank accounts containing $675,000. In a sworn statement, Mr. Shaikh admitted ownership of some of those accounts.
His sister, Uzma Shaheen, who lives in Chicago, has been called to testify. Documents filed in court show that Ms. Shaheen transferred more than $37 million from American bank accounts to Axact in Pakistan in recent years.
Still, much of Axact’s global network remains undisrupted. It controls 32 other bank accounts — in the United States, Ireland, Dubai, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, and Singapore — that are thought to contain millions of dollars, according to prosecution documents.
And in Pakistan, the case has run into quicksand. Two judges have recused themselves without explanation; so has Zahid Jamil, an ambitious prosecutor who built much of the case against Axact but quit abruptly in February, citing unspecified circumstances “that make it impossible for me to proceed further.”
Nighat Dad of the Digital Rights Foundation, an Internet advocacy group in Pakistan, said the Axact case showed that good laws also needed political will if they were to succeed.
“If the evidence is so clear, and there is so much of it, then why is the case against Axact taking so long?” she asked. “Something must be happening behind closed doors.”
ISLAMABAD, March 30: Four days into their protest outside at D-Chowk, supporters of the former Punjab governor’s assassin have agreed to call off their sit-in and disperse following a ‘successful’ round of negotiations with the government, Express News reported on Wednesday.
According to sources, the government has agreed to some of the demands of pro-Mumtaz Qadri supporters, which include the release of non-violent protesters, no amendment in blasphemy laws, and withdrawal of cases against ulema to be considered, among others.
However, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar denied any written agreement with the demonstrators.
“No written agreement or otherwise was reached between the protesters’ leaders and the government, neither anyone from the government was mandated to do so,” he said while speaking at a news conference after successful negotiations with the representatives of some religious parties.
Several thousand protesters had marched in Islamabad Sunday, clashing with security forces before setting up camp outside key government buildings along the capital’s main Constitution Avenue.
No one will be allowed to hold protest at D-Chowk: Nisar
The interior minister said the government will not allow any person or party to hold political rallies or protests in the Red Zone area of Islamabad.
“I as an interior minister have decided it will be prohibited from now on to hold rally or political conferences at the D-Chowk area,” he said.
Talking about the protests, the country’s top security czar said a few violent people had used the situation to politicise the matter. “Some scholars had decided to mark the 40th day of Qadri’s execution peacefully, but miscreants took an advantage of the situation and started marching towards Red Zone.”
He went on to say, “Time has come that we decided people or party who threaten the state by occupying this area will not be allowed to do so.”
Commenting on those who have been arrested during the four-day protests, Nisar said whoever broke the law will be prosecuted accordingly.
“Every single person who broke the law, many of whom have been arrested, will be prosecuted. However, the bystanders or people who were not involved in breaking of law will be released soon,” he said.
Earlier during the day, protesters said they would not end their days-long sit-in and were “willing to die”, as armed security forces readied to clear the camp.
A police source said more than 7,000 security forces were poised to clear the sit-in, including the paramilitary Rangers and Frontier Corps with reinforcements from the Punjab Police.
Army troops had been standing guard at government buildings near the protest camp.
Qadri’s hanging, hailed as a “key moment” by analysts in country’s war on religious extremism, has become a flashpoint for the deep divisions in the conservative Muslim country.
His funeral earlier this month drew tens of thousands in an extremist show of force that alarmed moderate Muslims in the country, while the call to hang Bibi along with the Easter attack in Lahore has underscored a growing sense of insecurity for Pakistan’s minorities.
“It’s a sense of great grief, sorrow and fear,” Shamoon Gill, spokesperson for the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, told AFP.
The Lahore blast had left Christians feeling that “no place is safe”, he said, while the “mob situation” in Islamabad was “dangerous”.
“They are a serious threat to Asia Bibi’s life… there is a chance the government could bow down to pressure on this issue,” he warned.
Former army chief flies overseas (Credit: alamy.com)
Lahore, March 18: Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf slipped out of the country in the early hours of Friday morning in a move widely interpreted as a sign the government has conceded defeat at the hands of an all-powerful military establishment.
The former army chief, who took power in a 1999 coup and was facing charges of treason, was finally removed from the country’s “exit control list” on Thursday after almost three years of being banned from international travel.
He had been prevented from leaving since April 2013, soon after he returned from self-imposed exile and became embroiled in a series of legal cases, including a historic government-initiated high treason trial.
That Musharraf had been banned from international travel for so long had been widely taken as a sign of the determination of the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to defy staunch opposition from the army’s high command and prosecute the man who ousted him in the 1999 coup.
But in a press conference late on Thursday night, the interior minister, Nisar Ali Khan, said the government would not prevent Musharraf from leaving on a Dubai-bound flight in order to seek medical attention overseas.
Khan said the government had relented because Musharraf had vowed to face all the cases against him and had “promised to return in four to six weeks”.
Musharraf’s lawyer said he would come back after having surgery on his back that he said was not available in Pakistan.
Many doubted that would be the case given the army would almost certainly not wish to see the return of a man who has become a key irritant in the always sensitive relationship between a dominant military establishment and a government yearning to reassert civilian supremacy.
Shaukat Qadir, a retired army officer, said the two sides appeared to have reached an accommodation.
“It is quite fair to think that a deal has been struck finally that perhaps the army wanted some time back,” he said. “Frankly I don’t think army chiefs should be exempt from anything but considering the circumstances hopefully he has now learned his lesson and won’t be coming back.”
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, leader of the opposition Pakistan People’s party, vowed to launch country-wide protests against the government for allowing Musharraf to travel.
Musharraf returned from a life of self-imposed exile in Dubai and London in March 2013 in a disastrous bid to contest a seat in that year’s general elections. Only sparse crowds turned up to welcome him home at Karachi airport in a sign he had gravely overestimated his support. He later said he had gauged his popularity from the number of followers he had attracted to his Facebook page.
He was swiftly de-barred from contesting any seats in a general election in which the party of his nemesis Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), swept the board.
And he became ensnared in a series of legal cases, including one alleging complicity in the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Far more serious, however, was the decision by the government to set up a special court to try Musharraf for treason, not for his 1999 coup but for taking emergency rule powers in 2007.
A successful prosecution would not only have risked a potential death sentence, it would also have amounted to an extraordinary challenge to the power and prestige of the country’s dominant military class.
The army was accused of taking drastic measures to find excuses for Musharraf not to appear in person at the trial when it was launched under heavy security in the capital.
On one occasion a roadside bomb was reportedly found along the way to the court just before Musharraf’s convoy was about leave his “farm house” in the suburbs of Islamabad. Later he claimed to have suffered a heart scare while on route to the court, causing a diversion to a military hospital where he remained for months on end.
Karachi, March 12: Allah Dino Khawaja was posted as Dadu SSP when he came up with a unique method to gain information on criminals. “During his posting, he started patrolling in the city under the guise of a milk seller and a vegetable supplier,” recalled Laila Ram Manglani, one of his best friends, explaining that Khawaja wanted to target corrupt cops who used to loot people on the streets.
“During his posting in Dadu, he focused mainly on [improving] police performance and suspended several [corrupt] SHOs in the volatile district,” he said. Manglani recalled how Dadu residents took to the streets in his favour when he was transferred out in the 1990s.
Humble origins
Khawaja, who belongs to a village in Tando Muhammad Khan district, was born in a Muslim family but was raised by a Hindu one. His father, Aziz Khawaja, was a landlord of the area and he was best friends with Daryano Mal, a local Hindu businessman who had no son of his own. Mal requested Aziz to allow him to take care of Khawaja and ended up paying for all his educational and other expenses.
Dal, who hailed from Jamshoro’s Thana Bola Khan area, had Khawaja enrol in Cadet College Petaro, from where he completed his Intermediate in 1982. After that, he completed his Master’s in Criminology from the University of Sindh, Jamshoro.
“Since my childhood, I wanted to become a police officer. I appeared for my Civil Service of Pakistan (CSS) exam in 1986-87 and passed it with flying colours,” Khawaja told The Express Tribune.
His exceptional score landed him a post in the foreign services but Khawaja had his eyes set on becoming a police officer. “I challenged the government decision and they reallocated me,” he said.
In the initial days, he worked in the Punjab as ASP and SP, and was later transferred to Sindh. “After appearing in the CSS exam, I also got admission in NED University in the civil engineering department but I dropped out soon after I passed the CSS exam,” he recalled.
When he speaks about his success, Khawaja gives credit to Dal, his Hindu mentor who helped fulfil his dreams. “This is a true story of my childhood. I am proud to be a Muslim and I am equally thankful to our Hindu family friend, who bore all my educational expenses and paved the way to make me a good citizen,” said Khawaja.
The cop life
Khawaja has served as SSP in various districts of Sindh and worked in Karachi as DIG in districts South and East, according to Sindh Police records. He also rendered his services in Intelligence Bureau (IB) as a joint director.
He was also posted as DIG for telecommunication and director for Sindh’s anti-corruption department. Khawaja also worked as personal staff officer for two chief ministers, Syed Muzaffar Hussain Shah and Syed Abdullah Shah.
Character certificate
Khawaja is known as one of the most respectable and honest officers in Sindh Police — a fact that led him to become one of the three members of the Supreme Court-appointed inquiry committee probing corruption charges against the outgoing Sindh IG.
Some officials accused Khawaja of embezzling government funds and using that money to establish petrol pumps but he denied these accusations. “This is just [an attempt] to malign me,” he said.
As he takes charge of the province during the crucial targeted operation in Karachi, Khawaja shared his plans. “My first priority will be to get rid of the defamed ‘thana culture’ and appoint police officers on merit,” he said.
My father was the governor of Punjab Province from 2008 until his death in 2011. At that time, he was defending a Christian woman who had fallen afoul of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which are used by the Sunni majority to terrorize the country’s few religious minorities. My father spoke out against the laws, and the judgment of television hosts and clerics fell hard on him. He became, in the eyes of many, a blasphemer himself. One January afternoon his bodyguard, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, shot him dead as he was leaving lunch.
Mr. Qadri became a hero in Pakistan. A mosque in Islamabad was named after him. People came to see him in prison to seek his blessings. The course of justice was impeded. The judge who sentenced him to death had to flee the country. I thought my father’s killer would never face justice.
But then, in the past few months, it became possible to see glimmers of a new resolve on the part of the Pakistani state. The Supreme Court upheld Mr. Qadri’s death sentence last October. Earlier this year, the president turned down the convict’s plea for mercy — which, at least as far as the law goes, was Mr. Qadri’s first admission that he had done anything wrong at all. Then on the last day of last month came the news: Pakistan had hanged Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. How would the country — not the state, but the people — respond?
I spoke to my sister in Lahore and for a moment we dared to hope that Pakistan, which had suffered so much from Islamic terrorism, might turn a corner. A lot had happened in the five years since Mr. Qadri killed our father. There was attack after hideous attack. In December 2014, terrorists struck a school in Peshawar, killing 132 children. Was it possible that Pakistan was tired of blood and radicalism? Had people finally begun to realize that those who kill in the name of a higher law end up becoming a law unto themselves? Had the horrors of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria done nothing to dampen enthusiasm for Islamism? Perhaps. I hoped.
But when a BBC interviewer asked me about this, something made me equivocate. I said it was too early to say and that we should be careful not to confuse the hardening resolve of the Pakistani government with the will of its people. Mr. Qadri’s funeral was the next day. That would give a better indication of the public mood.
And so it did.
An estimated 100,000 people — a crowd larger than the population of Asheville, N.C. — poured into the streets of Rawalpindi to say farewell to Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. It was among the biggest funerals in Pakistan’s history, alongside those of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the nation, and Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, who was assassinated in 2007. But this was no state funeral; it was spontaneous and it took place despite a media blackout.
As pictures emerged of the sea of humanity that coalesced around the white ambulance strewn with red rose petals that carried Mr. Qadri’s body, a few thoughts occurred to me: Was this the first funeral on this scale ever given to a convicted murderer? Did the men who took to the street in such great numbers come out of their hatred of my father or their love of his killer? They hardly knew Mr. Qadri. The only thing he had done in all his life, as far as they knew, was kill my father. Before that he was anonymous; after that he was in jail. Was this the first time that mourners had assembled on this scale not out of love but out of hate?
And finally, I wondered, what happens when an ideology of hate is no longer just coming from the mouths of Saudi-funded clerics but has infected the body of the people? What do you do when the madness is not confined to radical mosques and madrasas, but is abroad among a population of nearly 200 million?
The form of Islam that has appeared in our time — and that killed my father and so many others — is not, as some like to claim, medieval. It’s not even traditional. It is modern in the most basic sense: It is utterly new. The men who came to mourn my father’s killer were doing what no one before them had ever done. As I watched this unprecedented funeral, motivated not by love for the man who was dead but by hatred for the man he killed, I recognized that the throng in Rawalpindi was a microcosm of radical Islam’s relationship to our time. It drew its energy from the thing it was reacting against: the modernity that my father, with his condemnation of blasphemy laws and his Western, liberal ideas, represented. Recognizing this doesn’t pardon the 100,000 people who came to grieve for Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, but it reminds us that their existence is tied up with our own.
Once adored for its stunning landscape, dancing peacocks, serene wilderness, tapestry of colourful traditional attire, melody of Mai Bhagi, swirling sand, fascinating temples and majestic sand dunes, Thar has now emerged as an axis of hunger, malnutrition, abject poverty and unrelenting deaths of children.
