March to Red Zone: Funeral prayers for slain ASWJ men offered at D Chowk

Protesters disperse peacefully after sit-in.

ISLAMABAD:

Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) activists gathered at D Chowk, which falls in the high-security Red Zone, on Saturday morning to offer funeral prayers for two members who were shot dead a day before in the capital.

Unidentified gunmen riding on a motorcycle had attacked and killed ASWJ Islamabad Chapter General Secretary Mufti Muneer Ahmed Muawiya and ASWJ Tarnol unit in-charge Asad Mehmood in sector I-8/3 on Friday evening. The two ASWJ men were about to leave the area in a car. The police did not comment on the nature of the killings, but ASWJ representatives have repeatedly claimed that the attack was sectarian.

As the bodies were transported from the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences to the Lal Masjid in Sector G-6 in the morning, hundreds of ASWJ members formed a funeral procession and carried the coffins to D Chowk on Jinnah Avenue.



On Friday night, the ASWJ leadership had announced it would offer the funeral prayers of its slain members in front of a United Nations building in Islamabad, in a bid to attract international attention to the killings. However, the Islamabad Capital Territory administration held negotiations with the leadership of the religious organization on Thursday morning and persuaded the leadership to change its earlier decision and offer the prayers at D Chowk instead.

The funeral procession reached D Chowk around 11:30am, where the activists staged a brief sit-in, during which local clerics and the organisation’s leaders also addressed the gathering. They demanded that the government provide protection for ASWJ members and arrest the killers of Muawiya and Mehmood.

The funeral prayers were led by Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi. Soon after, the activists dispersed peacefully. Muawiya will be buried in his hometown of Murree.

Friday’s killings were the first allegedly sectarian-motivated killings of 2014 in the twin cities, which have been marred with tension between religious groups since violence broke out in Rawalpindi’s Raja Bazaar on Ashura in November.

Following the Ashura violence in Rawalpindi, incidents of sectarian violence have claimed several lives including those of three Shia police officers guarding an imambargah in Rawalpindi and a Shia cleric in Lahore. At least two demonstrations were also staged by the ASWJ in Islamabad in December, one of them to protest the killing of its Punjab chief.

Muawiya was one of the ASWJ demonstrators who were arrested on December 24 as they wrangled with police at Faizabad in an attempt to reach Raja Bazaar to protest in front of a Chehlum procession passing through the area at the time.

According to ASWJ members, Muawiya had been released on bail from Adiala Jail on Thursday night. He and Mehmood were going to Rawalpindi’s New Town Police Station to collect his belongings after visiting Muawiya’s father-in-law at a mosque in I-8/3, when they were shot at and killed.

An Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) administration official, requesting anonymity, said the administration began negotiations with ASWJ leaders on Friday night, after they announced they would march to the Red Zone to hold the funeral prayers in front of a UN building.

“We told them we would allow them to offer the funeral prayers at D Chowk if they agreed to remain peaceful and to stay outside the Red Zone,” the official said. “Since it was a funeral procession, we could not have used force to bar them from taking out a public procession.” The official said the administration did not grant ASWJ permission per se; it successfully negotiated with its leaders on the assurance that members would remain peaceful. “They retreated a little from their position and the ICT administration also made some concessions,” the official said.

The administration also coordinated with the Islamabad Police to protect the procession’s participants as well as traders and markets in Blue Area, according to officials.

Islamabad Superintendent of Police (City) Mustansar Feroze said around 1,000 police officials were deployed around D Chowk to offer security to participants of the funeral prayers, which amounts to 10 per cent of the police force. Police officials also escorted the funeral procession, while traffic police officials oversaw temporary road closures along the route taken by the procession to reach D Chowk from Lal Masjid.

At least 523 people were killed in sectarian-motivated attacks in the country during the past year, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which maintains a datasheet on sectarian violence in Pakistan based on news reports. The majority of the 523 killed belonged to the Shia sect, according to the SATP, while some ASWJ members were also reported killed.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2014.