No justice in sight

Muhammad Khan, the father of late Naqeebullah Mehsud, is no longer with us. He died on Monday at the CMH in Rawalpindi after a long battle against cancer. Into his final days he had attempted desperately to find justice for his son and also the three other young men killed alongside him in a fake encounter which took place in Karachi in January 2018. A year later, an ATC dismissed the claims of then SSP Rao Anwar that he and the other policemen on his team had shot down terrorists linked to major militant organizations. Rao Anwar himself is seen as a specialist in staged encounters and is thought to have been able to get away with some 500 such killings. Muhammad Khan had wanted only to see his son’s murderer put behind bars and penalized for the terrible crimes he had committed. This could not happen. Rao Anwar was granted bail, permitted to turn his house into a sub jail, carry out Umrah and attend family functions without restraints. Other policemen in the case are either in jail or are absconding.

The fact that Rao Anwar still walks free is obviously a testimony to our malfunctioning judicial system and the failure to deliver justice when it is due. Rao Anwar, and others like him, should have been brought to book many years ago. Today lawyers for Naqeebullah Mehsud and the other victims who died with him are pleading that his bail be cancelled. The hearings have continued for months. Suggestions that the case be moved from Karachi to Rawalpindi so that the ailing Muhammad Khan could testify were never entertained. Naqeebullah’s father was thus not able to testify in person, though he did send in some video messages not all of which were accepted.

It has now been almost three years since Naqeebullah was killed. Two separate Joint Investigation Teams have blamed termed his killing extrajudicial. But still those who have taken up his case have been largely silenced or censored — the most recent example of that being an art installation in Karachi, displaying gravestones and a documentary to mark the memory of encounter victims — apparently of Rao Anwar — taken down by plainclothes men. Extrajudicial killings have become the tool of choice of a system where police investigations are shoddy, prosecutors cannot be relied upon to build strong cases and witnesses are afraid to speak in court. The answer to this is not for the police to go rogue but for the government to remedy the flaws in our system. Rao Anwar may be the best known of the ‘encounter’ specialists but he was only the product of a system that is rotten to its core. Naqeebullah deserved better, Muhammad Khan deserved better, the Sahiwal encounter victims deserved better. It is time they rest in peace knowing they finally got justice.