Special report: Murder spotlights Pakistan’s ‘heroin kingpin’

The businessman has been ranked among international drug lords by US.

QUETTA/ KARACHI:

One night in March, police found a body slumped in the back of a black Toyota parked in an affluent neighbourhood of Karachi.

The man, a prominent public servant named Abdul Rehman Dashti, had been shot in the face. His watch, ring and money were gone.

Not far away, servants scrubbed blood from the driveway of an imposing house belonging to Imam Bheel, a businessman from Balochistan. Camera crews rushed to the scene, and Deputy Inspector-General Shaukat Ali Shah named the suspected killer: Bheel himself.

The allegation cracked a wall of silence around a man who the US says is a key gatekeeper in a heroin supply chain stretching from poppy fields in Afghanistan to street corners in the West. Three years earlier, US President Barack Obama had designated Bheel an international narcotics “kingpin” – ranking him with drug lords from Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico. The announcement drew scant attention in the local media and he continued to live quietly in Karachi, untroubled by police.

Bheel did not respond to requests made through his family for comment. Yaqoob Bizenjo, Bheel’s eldest son, denies his father is a drug trafficker and says the United States has provided no evidence to support its claim.

“He’s only a businessman. He’s not rich,” said Yaqoob, 30, who is a member of the national assembly.

Dashti’s relatives have launched a public call for justice, their anger sharpened by the fact Dashti had known Bheel for 25 years. They came from the same part of Makran. People thought they were friends.

“For us, he crossed the limit – he killed our brother,” said Fida Dashti, a slight man with a salt-and-pepper beard who spoke publicly about his brother’s murder for the first time to Reuters. “He can kill anyone he wants. We cannot sit quiet like other people, we have to raise our voice.”

Police have declined requests for comment since the murder.

The Dashtis filed an application to the Supreme Court in May demanding an inquiry. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry denied the request after reviewing a police report, a court official told Reuters. The judge is not obliged to explain his reasoning.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2012.