Under fire: Stranger walks into PPP office and guns down three workers

SC prescription to cleanse police force not being implemented, say observers.

KARACHI:

“What is your name?” asked the stranger who had entered the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) office in Orangi Town where Farhan Rana, Gulzar, Umar Hayat and Nafees Siddiqui were sitting.

The moment one of them answered, he was greeted with a barrage of gunfire. Three of them were killed and one of them was injured. Elsewhere, a member of their youth wing, the Peoples Students Federation’s Syed Hussain Mehsud, was killed in Mobina Town.

“We have been getting hit over the past three to four days,” said former PPP Karachi division president Najmi Alam, who helped pacify the protest as the bodies were taken to Chief Minister House. “We aren’t even a party to the fight.”

The fight Alam is referring to is the wave of political killings across the city over the past week. Every party claims to be a victim, and not part of the killing.

The bodies were taken from Abbasi Shaheed Hospital to the red zone where police used aerial firing and tear gas shelling to disperse the protesters.

The men were shot dead with a 9mm pistol and Farhan succumbed to his injuries at the hospital, but according to the police it is hard to determine what motivated these killings. “These were just regular party workers in the area, not any big names and they even used to roam around with boys from other political parties,” said DSP Tariq Malik. “They are not completely innocent themselves so it’s even possible that this was a personal enmity.”

DSP Malik said that multiple cases were already registered against Nafees alias Munna Bihari and Farhan alias Guddu in nearby police stations.

It will be a year in August since the Supreme Court took notice of Karachi’s bloodiest summer and gave a prescription to clean up the system. Since then, the killings may have tapered off, but nonetheless continue. “The initial findings of the Supreme Court were supposed to serve as an eye opener for the provincial executive,” remarked the president of the Karachi Bar Association Mehmoodul Hasan while talking to The Express Tribune on Friday. “It was asked to purge the police force of political appointees, make it independent of all types of pressures in order to control the target killing in the city.”

Hasan highlighted that the implementation of the law was the business and responsibility of the government and if Karachi’s no-go areas were eliminated and illegal weapons were seized, then the situation today would be altogether different.

The PPP’s Najmi Alam retorted that it was not just a matter of de-weaponising Karachi; that can’t be done unless you deweaponise the rest of the country. “I see things through the eyes of a political party when a party member dies,” he said. “The only thing I see working in Karachi is an operation like the one in Wana, otherwise nothing will ever change.”

The lawyer who represented the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in the suo motu proceedings, Senator Farogh A Naseem, said that like all orders of the court this one too needed to be implemented “strict sensu”.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2012.