From the time Pakistan was created to the year of the attack on the World Trade Centre, that is 1947 to 2001, the government issued 50,000 arms licences in Sindh. In the next decade, from 2001 to 2011, however, ten times the number of arms licences were handed out: 500,000.
These numbers were provided by the province’s top police official, Wajid Ali Durrani, who was answering questions in the Supreme Court on Wednesday during the suo motu proceedings into Karachi violence. At the end of the day, the Sindh government was told by the five-member bench to furnish all details of licences issued in the last two years.
“Give us the figures for Karachi,” the bench asked an ignorant Sindh Advocate General Abul Fattah Malik and Senator Baber Awan, counsel for the federal government. The issue was brought up again by the bench - comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Justices Anwar Zaheer Jamali, Amir Hani Muslim, Sarmad Jalal Osmany and Ghulam Rabbani. The proceedings have been focusing on the killings in Karachi, extortion, bodies in gunny bags and the volatile law and order situation. The inspector general of police and other high-ranking officials told us that light machine guns, rocket launchers and even anti-aircraft guns are in the possession of people, remarked the bench, adding both the federal and provincial governments generously issued arms licenses. Now the court wants the advocate general of Sindh to come up with the figures.
How is issuing licences for prohibited bores legal, asked a member of the bench, telling the federal government’s lawyer to see that instead of bore or calibre, the prohibition should be on automatic weapons.
At the tail-end of the proceedings, the bench asked the government to submit by Thursday morning all details of licences issued in the last two years. Just a fortnight earlier, the former Sindh home minister, Zulfiqar Mirza, had at a public rally in Lyari town claimed that he had issued 300,000 arms licences during his tenure. This comes to roughly 300 licences a day.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 15th, 2011.
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...a senior police officer said, in the past eight years alone, MQM was issued over a million arms licenses, mostly for handguns. Post has observed MQM security personnel carrying numerous shoulder-fired weapons, ranging from new European AKMs to crude AK copies, probably produced in local shops…
http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=203530