UK party’s spokesman was ‘gang leader’ in Pakistan

LONDON: A Pakistani man from Karachi who represented the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in media appearances has been called the “boss” of a kidnapping gang in Pakistan.
The BBC Newsnight reported that Mujeebur Rehman Bhutto, from a posh Karachi area with Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) links, was behind a high-profile kidnapping in Karachi in 2004 and he then took a £56,000 ransom payment in Manchester. Bhutto shot to prominence recently in Britain when he represented the extreme right-wing party as its Commonwealth spokesman.
Mujeeb’s father was a customs officer in Karachi. He lived in Gulshan Block 4 in Karachi, according to a source. The victim, Ahmed Naeem, who was kidnapped on June 11, 2004, from near his Gizri residence, was the son of a rich car dealer.
In 2005, 35-years-old Bhutto admitted being the gang’s “boss” and was jailed for seven years by a UK court.
Bhutto told Newsnight that he had admitted the charges against him in 2005 rather than risk being sent back to Pakistan and hanged. “The evidence which was brought against me was from Pakistan. The allegation was simply because of political rivalry,” he told the BBC. A source told The News that the kidnapped man was son of a rich Karachi businessman.
In 2005, Judge Haq Nawaz Baloch of the Anti-Terrorism Court-5 awarded death penalty to Fida Hussain Khoso son of SSP Nadir Khoso, Junaid Rehman son of Abdul Rehman Ansari, deputy controller of the Karachi Building Control Authority, Qurban Ali Khoso, Abdul Rasheed, Mohammad Atiq Bajwa and Khalid Aziz, for kidnapping the son of a car dealer. All these men were Mujeeb’s accomplices.
The BBC said that Mujeeb first flew to Manchester to take payment of a £56,000 ransom for a high-profile 2004 kidnapping, according to an investigation by BBC’s Newsnight programme. Suspects Mujeeb and Ghulam Murtaza Khan Bhutto, both sons of SPO Rano Khan Bhutto, and their alleged accomplice Saeed Naqi were arrested in a Manchester car park, soon after the delivery of the ransom.
In 2011 he became a member of UkIP, the BBC reported. He went on to appear as a spokesman for the party on the BBC debating show The Big Questions, and organised a trip to a mosque in Leeds for the party leader Nigel Farage. The BBC said he is still a wanted man in Pakistan. The BBC revealed that at one point as he negotiated a ransom he threatened to cut the victim’s head off and post it to his father.
Ahmed Naeem was then released by the gang in Pakistan, but Bhutto was arrested by Greater Manchester Police. The £56,000 ransom was found hidden at his house in Leeds, and he was forced to repay it.
A UkIP spokesman has said Bhutto joined the party less than a year ago from the Conservative Party but he resigned his membership “when we recently became aware of possible issues relating to his past and raised the matter with him.”
He was sentenced under the name Majeebur Bhutto. “You came to the UK to avoid the risk of detection in Pakistan, where kidnapping is a capital offence,” said the judge, Martin Steiger.