KARACHI: Nationwide protests at the police killing of a young ethnic Pashtun man in Pakistan’s largest city have shone a spotlight on allegations of persecution by the authorities against refugees from the country’s conflict-ridden northwest.
The country’s Supreme Court launched an inquiry on Jan. 19 into the death of 27-year-old aspiring fashion model Naqibullah Mehsud. He was one of four men killed six days earlier in what police initially said was a shoot-out with suspected Islamist militants. The Supreme Court plans to begin hearings on the case on Saturday.
The police team that killed Mehsud was under the command of senior superintendent Anwar Ahmed Khan, who has been suspended since Jan. 20 on the recommendation of a police inquiry committee. The committee was set up after Mehsud’s father, Muhammad Khan Mehsud, who denies his son had any militant links, filed a kidnapping and killing complaint against him.
Anwar told Reuters he had done nothing wrong and said the investigation into his officers’ actions could allow the Taliban to regain a foothold in ethnic Pashtun parts of the city.
“I had no knowledge of Naqibullah Mehsud. My staff told me that he is a militant with a criminal history,” he said.
Police data from 2011 reviewed by Reuters shows that in the seven years Anwar has been in charge of Karachi’s Malir district, which has a large Pashtun population, at least 450 people have been killed in 200 clashes with police that involved weapons. The data does not give details of the circumstances of the shootings.
A senior police official, who asked not to be identified, said that the majority of those killed were ethnic Pashtuns. Pakistan’s ethnic Pashtun borderlands have been a hotbed of Islamist militancy in recent decades.
Militant policy
Pakistani police refer to any armed clash with suspects as an “encounter.” Some human rights activists and families of victims have for years alleged that such incidents are often staged to cover up extrajudicial killings.
Anwar told Reuters that armed operations to kill suspects were official police policy in Sindh Province, of which Karachi is the capital, to combat the threat from militants.
“There was an on-going official policy ... for carrying out encounters to take out criminals and I have broken no law,” he said.
The provincial police chief denied there was such a policy.
“I don’t need to respond to irresponsible allegations,” Inspector General of Sindh police Allah Dino Khawaja said in a brief text message in reply to Reuters’ questions. “He has to appear before the investigation to defend and prove his claims.”
Sindh police said in a statement on Jan. 20 it had launched an inquiry “to ascertain the facts regarding the police encounter in which Naqibullah Mehsud was killed.”
Some campaigners among the sprawling city’s Pashtun community say the story is not unusual. But it is the first to receive nationwide attention — in part because Mehsud, known as Naqib, does not fit the image of the militant from Pakistan’s lawless northern heartlands.
“He had a passion for wearing good clothes ... even in the picture of his body circulating on social media, he is seen wearing good clothes,” his cousin Noor Rehman told Reuters, while holding back tears.
Another senior police officer said no evidence linking Naqib to militancy had been found.
“His particulars were checked in all the criminal databases of police and nothing came up,” the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan’s chief justice on Tuesday summoned Anwar to appear for questioning at its first hearing this weekend. Earlier that day, he was not allowed to board a flight leaving Pakistan for Dubai, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency said.
Anwar told Reuters he does not plan to appear before the court. He said his children are studying in Dubai and he frequently visits.
Target group
Pashtuns are Pakistan’s second largest ethnic group, and many have moved to the country’s big cities to escape violence along the Afghan border.
But since the emergence of the Pakistani Taliban, whose leadership also comes from the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, Pashtuns who spoke to Reuters in Karachi say they are all now seen as potential militants.
“This is not just about the fact that police are killing people, it is about racial profiling,” Jibran Nasir, a human rights lawyer who said he was filing a petition with the Senate’s human rights committee, told Reuters.
“Naqib had a very public profile. Looking at pictures of Naqib modelling ... no one is willing to believe he had anything to do with Taliban. The problem here is not every Pashtun killed and profiled here is a model.”
Figures posted by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) on its website show 1,226 people were killed in 784 police encounters nationwide in the past two years.
In the days after Mehsud was killed, thousands of activists and Pashtun students staged protests in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad and Quetta.
In Sohrab Goth, the majority Pashtun suburb of Karachi where Naqib’s family live, three families told Reuters they had lost relatives in such incidents.
Reuters was shown death certificates and newspaper clippings, but was not able to independently confirm the circumstances of their deaths.
Sohail Anwer Sial, home minister in the Sindh provincial government whose department is responsible for the police, said the authorities were taking action over the Mehsud case, but that one or two incidents did not mean the entire police force was corrupt.
“The same police force ... eradicated violence from the city during Karachi operation’, which began in 2013 against militants,” he said. “One person’s actions cannot be allowed to malign the system.”
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Pakistan police killing of a Pashtun youth fuels anger over “encounters“
Pakistan police killing of a Pashtun youth fuels anger over “encounters“
Inside Chernobyl, Ukraine scrambles to repair radiation shield
CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT: Inside an abandoned control room at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant, a worker in an orange hardhat gazed at a grey wall of seemingly endless dials, screens and gauges that were supposed to prevent disaster.
The 1986 meltdown at the site was the world’s worst ever nuclear incident. Since Russia invaded in 2022, Kyiv fears another disaster could be just a matter of time.
In February, a Russian drone hit and left a large hole in the New Safe Confinement (NSC), the outer of two radiation shells covering the remnants of the nuclear power plant.
It functions as a modern high-tech replacement for an inner steel-and-concrete structure — known as the Sarcophagus, a defensive layer built hastily after the 1986 incident.
Ten months later, repair work is still ongoing, and it could take another three to four years before the outer dome regains its primary safety functions, plant director Sergiy Tarakanov told AFP in an interview from Kyiv.
“It does not perform the function of retaining radioactive substances inside,” Tarakanov said, echoing concerns raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The strike had also left it unclear if the shell would last the 100 years it was designed to.
The gaping crater in the structure, which AFP journalists saw this summer, has been covered over with a protective screen, but 300 smaller holes made by firefighters when battling the blaze still need to be filled in.
Scaffolding engulfs the inside of the giant multi-billion-dollar structure, rising all the way up to the 100-meter-high ceiling.
Charred debris from the drone strike that hit the NSC still lay on the floor of the plant, AFP journalists saw on a visit to the site in December.
- ‘Main threat’ -
Russia’s army captured the plant on the first day of its 2022 invasion, before withdrawing a few weeks later.
Ukraine has repeatedly accused Moscow of targeting Chernobyl and its other nuclear power plants, saying Moscow’s strikes risk triggering a potentially catastrophic disaster.
Ukraine regularly reduces power at its nuclear plants following Russian strikes on its energy grid.
In October, a Russian strike on a substation near Chernobyl cut power flowing to the confinement structure.
Tarakanov told AFP that radiation levels at the site had remained “stable and within normal limits.”
Inside a modern control room, engineer Ivan Tykhonenko was keeping track of 19 sensors and detection units, constantly monitoring the state of the site.
Part of the 190 tons of uranium that were on site in 1986 “melted, sank down into the reactor unit, the sub-reactor room, and still exists,” he told AFP.
Worries over the fate of the site — and what could happen — run high.
Another Russian hit — or even a powerful nearby strike — could see the inner radiation shell collapse, director Tarakanov told AFP.
“If a missile or drone hits it directly, or even falls somewhere nearby ... it will cause a mini-earthquake in the area,” he said.
“No one can guarantee that the shelter facility will remain standing after that. That is the main threat,” he added.
The 1986 meltdown at the site was the world’s worst ever nuclear incident. Since Russia invaded in 2022, Kyiv fears another disaster could be just a matter of time.
In February, a Russian drone hit and left a large hole in the New Safe Confinement (NSC), the outer of two radiation shells covering the remnants of the nuclear power plant.
It functions as a modern high-tech replacement for an inner steel-and-concrete structure — known as the Sarcophagus, a defensive layer built hastily after the 1986 incident.
Ten months later, repair work is still ongoing, and it could take another three to four years before the outer dome regains its primary safety functions, plant director Sergiy Tarakanov told AFP in an interview from Kyiv.
“It does not perform the function of retaining radioactive substances inside,” Tarakanov said, echoing concerns raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The strike had also left it unclear if the shell would last the 100 years it was designed to.
The gaping crater in the structure, which AFP journalists saw this summer, has been covered over with a protective screen, but 300 smaller holes made by firefighters when battling the blaze still need to be filled in.
Scaffolding engulfs the inside of the giant multi-billion-dollar structure, rising all the way up to the 100-meter-high ceiling.
Charred debris from the drone strike that hit the NSC still lay on the floor of the plant, AFP journalists saw on a visit to the site in December.
- ‘Main threat’ -
Russia’s army captured the plant on the first day of its 2022 invasion, before withdrawing a few weeks later.
Ukraine has repeatedly accused Moscow of targeting Chernobyl and its other nuclear power plants, saying Moscow’s strikes risk triggering a potentially catastrophic disaster.
Ukraine regularly reduces power at its nuclear plants following Russian strikes on its energy grid.
In October, a Russian strike on a substation near Chernobyl cut power flowing to the confinement structure.
Tarakanov told AFP that radiation levels at the site had remained “stable and within normal limits.”
Inside a modern control room, engineer Ivan Tykhonenko was keeping track of 19 sensors and detection units, constantly monitoring the state of the site.
Part of the 190 tons of uranium that were on site in 1986 “melted, sank down into the reactor unit, the sub-reactor room, and still exists,” he told AFP.
Worries over the fate of the site — and what could happen — run high.
Another Russian hit — or even a powerful nearby strike — could see the inner radiation shell collapse, director Tarakanov told AFP.
“If a missile or drone hits it directly, or even falls somewhere nearby ... it will cause a mini-earthquake in the area,” he said.
“No one can guarantee that the shelter facility will remain standing after that. That is the main threat,” he added.
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