Special Branch (SB), Sindh Rangers, and the Crime Investigation Department of the Sindh Police to interrogate Ajmal Pahari, who was tagged as a high-profile dreaded terrorist belonging to the militant wing of the MQM.
His name became synonymous with fear not only for his numerous deadly feats, but also for alleged extortion and land grabbing in the city.Police officials had kept a tab on his activities for a long time but they admit that he had been set free numerous times because he was strongly backed by one political party. In 1997, an anti-terrorism court had declared Ajmal Pahari a proclaimed offender in a case related to the killing of four American Union Texas employees in Karachi along with their Pakistani driver. Back then, the reward for Pahari was Rs1 million and he was finally nabbed by the Central Investigation Agency (CIA) of Karachi police in 2000. But within five years, Pahari was acquitted in all cases and was released in 2005.
According to his confessional statement recorded by the JIT on March 31, 2011 after he was rearrested, Ajmal Pahari had confessed to having killed 111 people in Karachi out of which 53 were murdered between 1986 and 2000 and 58 others were killed between 2005 and 2011, till his arrest. He claimed that instructions for these killings used to come from the London Secretariat; from Nine Zero in Karachi and from South Africa. “After receiving instructions from London, Zeeshan and I went to Singapore in 1996. From there I went to India for training. Five Indian Army officers had trained me and my accomplices during our six-month stay there in a camp near New Delhi”, the JIT report quoted Pahari as saying.
According to the Joint Investigation Report No SO (LE-I)/3-16/2010, Ajmal Pahari, a resident of Orangi town and a worker of the MQM since 1986, revealed that he went to India via Singapore in 1996 on the instructions of Nadeem Nusrat, former political secretary of the MQM chief Altaf Hussain at the London Secretariat. He and four other members of the MQM went through a rigorous military training at a camp near New Delhi. But the MQM was quick to defend Ajmal Pahari and refute his involvement, with the former Nazim of Karachi Mustafa Kamal holding a press conference, saying that he was arrested on flimsy charges and tortured into making false confessions about killing people on the instructions of the MQM leadership.
Mustafa Kamal had questioned the authenticity of the JIT report, saying that any person interrogated by a JIT team would even confess to plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks in less than two hours. By September 2012, the courts had acquitted Pahari in 11 murder cases after dismissing them for want of evidence as the witnesses in these cases retracted their statements wherein they had earlier accused him of committing murders. Pahari also retracted his confessional statement, saying it was recorded by his interrogators under duress.
The Sindh government kept him under detention for three more months under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance (MPO). But he had to be released after the Sindh High Court had ordered his release on January 18, 2013. He was set free the next day - January 19, 2013.
However, taking notice of Pahari’s release during the hearing of the case regarding non-implementation of the Karachi target killing case’s verdict on January 23, 2013, the then Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry asked the Advocate General Sindh Fateh Muhammad Malik to explain as to how a notorious killer got released.
Responding, Fateh said that it was not the Sindh government but the Sindh High Court which had released Pahari. The CJ had then sought details of the cases against Pahari to determine as to who was actually responsible for his release. The records subsequently provided to the chief justice also included Ajmal Pahari’s interrogation report by the JIT. After seeing the JIT’s report, Chief Justice Chaudhry had observed: “Ajmal Pahari’s declaration of guilt is an eye-opener”.
Almost a week later, on January 30, 2013, Ajmal Pahari was once again arrested by the Karachi police and booked in four more murder cases that took place between 2004 and 2008. He had confessed these murders during interrogation when arrested earlier by the Anti-Extremist Cell of the Crime Investigation Department on March 18, 2011 from the New Karachi area.
After the approval of the Sindh High Court, he was shifted from the Central Prison Karachi to the Central Jail Sukkur where he was being kept in a separate cell, having all the VIP facilities until recently including cable television and cell phone.
While there is a possibility of the authorities deciding to send all the pending murder cases against Pahari to the military courts for speedy trials, the notorious target killer and his many other accomplices like Faisal Mota are reportedly getting ready to record their video confessions just like Saulat Mirza, as they too feel having been abandoned by their backers.