Saulat Mirza — a hardened criminal

ISLAMABAD: The condemned target killer from Karachi, Saulat Mirza, who is being hanged for killing KESC ex-chief Shahid Hamid in 1997, is known in the world of terrorism for heading a notorious target killing squad from his jail cell, which killed countless people including jail officials who dared to question Mirza’s illegal activities in prison.
Mirza is the first target killer who is being hanged after almost two and a half decades of ruthless target killings in Karachi in which tens of thousands of people were killed but none was prosecuted.
Saulat Mirza was arrested for killing the then MD of KESC Malik Shahid Hamid, when Mirza arrived from Bangkok at the Karachi airport in December 1998. The record shows that on May 24, 1999, Mirza an anti-terrorism court in Karachi sentenced him to death after he was found guilty of murdering Hamid, his driver, Ashraf Brohi and guard Khan Akbar on July 5, 1997 in Defence, Karachi.
The Sindh High Court and the Supreme Court (SC) dismissed Mirza’s appeals against the death penalty on January 21, 2000, and September 14, 2001, respectively. The SC also rejected the review appeal on March 9, 2004. According to law, the police sources say, Mirza should have been executed after the disposal of his mercy petition.
Different methods were tried to get him off the hook including threatening heirs of Shahid Hamid to grant Saulat mercy under Qisas in 2003. Then, the sources say, in 2004, the governor of Sindh even attempted to have the constitutional pardon powers of the president transferred to himself, so that he could grant mercy to Saulat. For four years, the file for Saulat’s mercy petition remained in the governor house, whereas the legal time limit for the execution of a convict is seven days from the announcement of the final appeal. Finally the file reached the interior ministry in 2008, where it took seven more years to bring Shahid Hamid’s killer to justice.
The killing of Shahid Hamid by Mirza is just a tip of the iceberg as Mirza is said to have allegedly committed 58 murders after being released on parole in 2004. In the jail too, Mirza headed a death squad and issued instructions to the target killers to murder Karachi residents and the number of victims runs into thousands. No one dared to stop him from any of his activities. A jail official Amanullah Niazi was shot dead in 2006 when he tried to interfere in Mirza’s activities. Many others were openly threatened.
It is worth mentioning here that MQM has always been defending Saulat Mirza till January 2015 and has been terming him innocent. But of late, MQM chief Altaf Hussain has disowned Saulat Mirza saying he has only heard his name. Such dissociation is a message for all those who crossed all limits to please their masters but were abandoned when they landed in trouble.