Gone but not forgotten

The murder of Perween Rahman, the then-director of the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, in March 2013 was one of the more shameful of a string of shameful acts committed on the blind side of both the state and forces of law and order. She was deeply inconvenient to a lot of very powerful people who had no scruples about rubbing her out when the opportunity arose. Her constant efforts to oppose the land grabbers and the encroachers as well as her support for the Goth Abad project in the end cost her her life. Her murder was at the time deemed mysterious yet there was nothing mysterious about it whatsoever, and some of the ‘mystery’ is now stripped away with the report of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) that had been appointed to investigate her murder.

The Sindh police on Wednesday, March 21^st conceded in the Supreme Court that her death was indeed the result of a deadly conspiracy by those who felt threatened by her. The report also laid to rest another fable — that the linkage of the murder of Qazi Bilal who may have been a senior commander of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan was in all likelihood false. He died in an ‘encounter’ the day after Ms Rahman. Reports by the police on the linkage were found by the JIT were deemed “simply unbelievable”. In all likelihood Bilal died as a result of internal turf wars between Taliban factions but was used as ‘cover’ for the murder of Ms Rahman. The report is a litany of police malpractice and incompetence. This is an exposure of the Karachi police at their very worst. The very antithesis of what ought to be their raison d’être. On the plus side at least one of those involved in the cover-up after the Rahman murder is now out of the force and facing a murder charge in an unrelated case. 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2018.

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