MQM threatens to protest every day if missing persons not found

Party says those responsible for killings workers should be caught.

KARACHI: Leaders of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) warned that they would stage a sit-in everyday if those responsible for killing their party workers were not caught.

While speaking outside Karachi Press Club, Dr Farooq Sattar said that they would establish a people’s court on the streets if their missing party workers were not found.

More than a hundred members and activists of the party turned up at the demonstration held by the MQM against extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of party workers.

According to the MQM, 45 party workers had gone missing since January 2014, 83 had been killed in extra judicial and target killings since the operation started in the city.

Sattar said that if no action was taken against men in plain clothes who abduct party worker, then they too would dress in plain clothes to deal with these men. He added that the party had information about who these men were and who was giving them orders.

The party leader appealed to the Supreme Court to take sou moto action. He said that those involved in  extrajudicial killings were violating the constitution and should be arrested.

MQM’s Haider Abbas Rizvi said that they were protesting as wanted to share what the families of the missing persons were going through. He added that the party had asked for a targeted operation in the city against criminals, but many men were being taken away just because they supported the MQM.

Khawaja Izharul Hasan, an MQM MPA, said the missing persons petitions were being heard in court after a month and the commission on missing persons which comes to Karachi every year, has yet to hear these cases.

For their loved ones

Men and women were gathered outside the press club holding photographs of their loved ones who had gone missing.

“If my son is a criminal, take him to court,” Shamim Bano pleased to law enforcement agencies. “Don’t do this. Don’t make him disappear.”

Last April, her son Farooq Ahmed was picked up from the passport office in Saddar by men in plain clothes. His mother said that Farooq’s newborn baby boy was only 10-days-old when he went missing. Now, she said, the child is a year old and the family still has no information about his whereabouts.

Shamim Bano has been to many police stations and hospitals in search for her son. “He is diabetic,” she said. “I don’t know how his health is or what situation he is in.”

Kashifa was standing next to Bano clutching at a photograph of her husband Muhammad Farhan. She said he was picked up from Gulshan-e-Maymar on December 7, 2013, in front of her eyes. “Every time we hear about a body being found we can’t breathe,” she said.

Rubab said since her father, Muhammad Irshad, went missing she had to stop going to college as there was no one to fund her education.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 18^th, 2014.