Missing for 15 years: Bahawalpur student was killed in Afghan camp

DPO informs SC that Khurram Ilyas was encouraged to flee to Afghanistan in 1998.

ISLAMABAD:

A Bahawalpur student, who went missing from his city in July 1998, was found dead in an Afghan militant camp in August 1998 following a US missile attack, police informed a Supreme Court bench hearing a petition regarding his enforced disappearance on Monday. 

Khurrum Ilyas, a medical college freshman, fled home and headed to Afghanistan after being “disturbed by domestic affairs,” informed District Police Officer Sohail Zaffar Chatta to the three-member SC bench. He finally stopped to serve at the Khalid Bin Waleed camp in Afghanistan, which US forces targeted and destroyed in August 20, 1998.



According to Chatta, Ilyas, along with five other Pakistanis present at the camp, was killed in this attack but their bodies could not be brought back to Pakistan for they were “mutilated beyond recognition.”

To substantiate his statement, Chattha produced a man named Imran Mehmood who, along with 80 boys led two buses into Afghanistan from Bahawalpur on the very same day that Ilyas left his house in 1998.

Imran informed the court that Ilyas accompanied him, along with many other Pakistani men who were eager to go to Afghanistan to do jihad and meet Mullah Omer, the Taliban chief.



Moreover, a statement of Ibrahim Chishti, who served as Ameer of a militant camp Harkatul Mujahideen in 1998, informed the SC bench that several tours were arranged for interested people in Bahawalpur who wished to travel to Afghanistan. He added that in 1998, 1,300 to 1,400 men from the Bahawalpur district had travelled to Afghanistan to serve as militants.

However, Ilyas’ mother Iqbal Bibi, who had filed a petition regarding her missing son in 2011 was not convinced. “I do not trust the witnesses brought forward by the police and the story concocted by the investigators about the killing of my son in Afghanistan,” said the disturbed-looking mother to the SC bench.

Rana Dilshad, also a complainant in the FIR and an uncle of Ilyas’ blamed his nephew’s friend Shoaib Azhar for abduction.

But Chatta quickly cleared Shoaib claiming that he had no role to play in Ilyas’ disappearance. Instead, he added that Ilyas was distressed by domestic issues which encouraged him to flee from home.

The bench headed by Justice Jawaad S Khawaja, comprising Justice Khilji Arif Hussain and Justice Ejaz Afzal Khan, took the report submitted by the DPO as trustworthy and disposed of the petition, praising DPO Chatta for solving the difficult case.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 4^th, 2013.