Lawless ‘lawman’

With three young men losing their lives in little more than a week in Karachi – in different incidents – the issue of extrajudicial killings as well as police excess has come to the forefront once again. We saw how 19-year old student Intezaar Ahmad was killed by officials of the Anti-Car Lifting Cell, who initially denied any involvement. We also saw how a man in a rickshaw on Shahrah-e-Faisal was shot dead after being caught in crossfire between the police and a group of suspected robbers. The deceased family has disputed the police version of the incident. The most high-profile of these ‘encounters’ was the killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud on the orders of SSP Rao Anwar. A cop with nine lives, ‘encounter specialist’ SSP Rao Anwar has been suspended many times before for the extrajudicial killings with which he has made his name. This time needs to be different. A three-member probe committee has found that there is no evidence to suggest that Mehsud was a member of a militant group. Mehsud’s family maintain that he had been picked up on January 3 and then murdered nine days later, contradicting Anwar’s story that the young man had been killed while trying to resist police action.

After media and public outrage, and the probe committee’s initial report, the Sindh government has removed Anwar from his post and placed him on the ECL. Still, the real scandal is that he has been allowed to serve as an SSP for so long. Anwar’s penchant for extrajudicial killings has been known since the 1990s when as an SHO he was implicated in the murder of MQM activists during the operations against the party. In the 2000s he re-emerged from a spell in Balochistan and showed he hadn’t changed, with the targets of his ‘encounters’ this time being alleged militants. A favourite of the PPP, an FIR was registered against him on the orders of the Sindh High Court in 2016 for his role in ‘encounters’ but the Sindh government did not take the case any further.

Needless to say, Anwar needs to be placed on trial for Naqeeb’s death. But there also needs to be a reckoning for those who have sustained the career of this lawless lawman. A man who has unapologetically chosen ‘encounters’ as his preferred method of policing can only survive with the patronage of powerful forces. Part of the reason he has been able to get away with this abuse of power for so long is that he, and others like him, have had the tacit support of many in power. As important as it is to punish Rao Anwar and other police officials with contempt for rule of law, there also needs to be a change of culture within the police. Whether guilty or not, suspects should never have to pay with their lives before they even have a change to defend themselves in a court of law. It is true that cases against accused criminals often collapse in court but the solution is to improve investigations, not gun down suspects in cold blood.