IBA registrar attack: ‘The men shot at me when I was in the car with my children’

Khand says his appearance in court angered the suspects.

KARACHI: The registrar of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Sukkur, Zahid Hussain Khand, who was shot twice on Wednesday has regained consciousness.

He spoke to The Express Tribune about the incident and the land dispute.

At 8:15 am, a Honda Civic swerved in on Airport Road, near the campus. “There were three men in the car. Two of them came out and one shot me while I was in the car,” Khand told The Express Tribune over the telephone from his Aga Khan Hospital room on Sunday.

Khand was driving the car, while his nine-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat.

His two sons, 14 and 12 years old, were in the back seat. “I started crying in pain [after the first gunshot] and got out of the car,” he said. “The man shot me again, saying ‘How dare you drag our Sardar to court’.”

After this, the assailants escaped.

Khand was shot in the left leg and his right hand. “My children were in the car with me. The men could have done absolutely anything. God saved them somehow,” he said. Just a few days before the incident, Khand had appeared in court as he was the main complainant in the case against Pakistan Muslim League-Q MPA Sheheryar Mahar and his men for their alleged attack at IBA Sukkur.

On April 14, 150 people ‘loyal to Mahar’ attacked and tried to take over the 5.5 acres of land allotted to the institute by the government. “In court, I just appeared and narrated the incident in front of the judge.

Sheharyar Mahar’s men and his lawyer were present in court at the time of my testimony,” Khand said.

This matter is neither in my personal interest nor IBA director Nisar Siddiqui’s, he said.

“We don’t have to build our own houses on the land. We are just using it to provide quality education, that too, to [students from the] rural areas.

“As registrar, it was my duty to report an incident related to my institute, which I duly performed.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2010.