Six years on: Committee to probe Karsaz blasts vanishes into thin air

Former committee head willing to work without salary as long as govt lets him work on merit.

KARACHI:

The committee formed to probe the Karsaz blasts at its five-year anniversary last year has vanished into thin air, The Express Tribune has learnt.

On October 18, 2012, Sindh chief minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah had formed a new investigative team - headed by the then chief of the Crime Investigation Department, Ghulam Shabbir Shaikh - to probe the twin blasts on Karsaz Road in 2007 that targeted the homecoming convoy of Benazir Bhutto and killed nearly 180 people. The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader survived the attack but the investigative agencies failed to make any progress on the culprits. Six years on, the situation is no different.

The team formed last year was disbanded soon after, according to its members, who blamed the government for being insincere. “I told the government that I will work on merit,” Shaikh told The Express Tribune. Even though Shaikh has retired from the police force, he said he is willing to work on this case without a salary as long as he is allowed to work independently.



Meanwhile, the PPP leadership continues to blame ‘hidden forces’. “The same forces that fear the PPP was behind the bombings,” claimed Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Memon. When asked who the forces are, he replied vaguely: “No comment.”

On the party’s behalf, Memon said they registered an FIR but there was still no progress. “A major reason behind the pending case is that the government of that time washed away all evidence from the site of the blasts,” he said.

Some leads

An alleged militant of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Azmatullah, was arrested from Manghopir in 2010 for playing an important role in the Karsaz carnage but he was later released due to lack of evidence. According to a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) member, SP Niaz Khosa, a JIT was formed to interrogate Azmatullah but they found no evidence against him. “He was, in fact, in Dubai when the blasts in Karsaz took place,” he said.

Khosa explained that the alleged militant was arrested because Benazir had named him in her book. “He [Azmatullah] was released from jail and we do not know where he is now,” he said. His brother, Wahabullah, was also accused of leading a group of TTP members in North Waziristan and was believed to be the mastermind of the bombings. But he went into hiding in the tribal belt, well away from the reach of the law enforcers.

Meanwhile, the investigators probing the Karsaz and Rawalpindi carnages believed that separate groups were behind both the attacks. “The suspects arrested over Rawalpindi’s carnage belonged to the Ahmed Shah group of TTP’s Baitullah Mehsud,” informed SP Khosa. “We had also interrogated the suspects arrested over Rawalpindi’s carnage but they did not have any links or information about the Karsaz tragedy.”

Pending investigations

The investigators have also been unable to arrest the culprits behind the assassination of Khalid Shahenshah and Bilal Shaikh - members of Benazir’s security team. Shahenshah, the top security guard for former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and a key witness in her assassination case, was targeted in Clifton on July 2008. Bilal, who was also accompanying Benazir at Karsaz was killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi’s Jamshed Quarters in July this year.

The police insist, however, that there are no links between these killings and blasts. “The terrorists who carried out the bombings at Benazir’s caravan were killed at the time and the perpetrators behind them, including Baitullah Mehsud, have been killed in drone attacks in Waziristan,” pointed out SP Chaudhry Aslam Khan. “There is nothing left to investigate now. In my opinion, the case is closed.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2013.