KARACHI: A Saudi prince’s plans to acquire privately-owned air carrier, Shaheen Air International is akin to “breathing new life into Pakistan’s dying aviation industry”, experts said on Friday.
“Shaheen Air International has finalized its acquisition deal with a Saudi prince. The takeover is likely to happen over the course of the next two months,” Zohaib Hassan, spokesman of Shaheen Air International (SAI), told Arab News, without naming the investor.
He added that more details would be unveiled in a joint news conference next week.
“We will be conducting a press conference very soon to announce the name of the investor and share details of the acquisition. This will be a breakthrough deal for the airline as well as for Pakistan’s aviation industry,” Javed Sehbai, acting CEO of SAI, said in a statement released on Thursday.
“It’s a matter of a few weeks before Shaheen Air takes to the skies again and shines brighter than before. Due payments of government regulatory bodies and our employees’ salaries are our first priority and will be cleared during the first stage of our investment plans,” he added.
Shaheen Air commenced its operations as Pakistan’s first private airline in December 1993. “It operates on various domestic and international routes and in 2015, it became the only private airline from Pakistan to fly east with non-stop flights from Lahore to Guangzhou, China,” Sehbai said.
However, the airline’s domestic and international operations were suspended due to a dispute with Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority over non-payment of arrears amounting to more than Rs1.5 billion.
“Once Shaheen Air was the top private airline of Pakistan but the past several months have been difficult for us. Our offices are sealed and our operations suspended. In such a scenario, the Saudi investment is like a new life for the airline,” Sehbai said.
Tariq Abul Hasan, an expert in civil aviation for more than two decades, recalls a time when Pakistan’s aviation industry was flourishing, specifically until the mid-80s when Pakistan’s national carrier, the PIA, was one of the 10 best airlines in the world.
In the private sector, however, Shaheen Air was the country’s top private airline with its own hanger and best engineering staff. “PIA was the first Asian airline which started direct flights for Europe. Pakistan’s civil aviation industry was once the fastest growing, with more than 40 airlines, including the world’s top airline, flying from Karachi,” he said, adding that in the current situation, the Saudi investment is a major relief for the sector.
Shaheen Air, besides ensuring profitable routes for Europe and Gulf, also has a permit for operating Hajj flights, Hasan said, adding that in order to fly higher, “all it needed was this deal.”
Saudi prince to be the wind beneath Shaheen Air’s wings
Saudi prince to be the wind beneath Shaheen Air’s wings
- Officials say airline to be taken over by a member of the royal family in two months
- Move could help revive Pakistan’s dying aviation industry, experts say
Pakistani man convicted in US in political assassination plot tied to Iranian paramilitary
- Asif Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses
- He testified he met a Revolutionary Guard operative who gave him countersurveillance training, assignments
NEW YORK: A Pakistani business owner who tried to hire hit men to kill a US politician was convicted Friday in a trial that showcased allegations of Iran-backed plotting on American soil.
As the Iran war unfolded in the Mideast, Asif Merchant acknowledged in a US court that he sought to put an assassination in motion during the 2024 presidential campaign — a plot that was quickly disrupted by American investigators before it had a chance to proceed.
A jury in Brooklyn convicted Merchant on terrorism and murder for hire charges.
The verdict after only a couple hours of deliberations followed a weeklong trial that included remarkable testimony from Merchant himself.
Merchant told the jury he was carrying out instructions from a contact in the Islamic Republic’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. According to Merchant, the handler never specified a target but broached names including then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who was also in the race for a time.
The Iranian government has denied trying to kill US officials.
The nascent plot fell apart after Merchant showed an acquaintance what he had in mind by using objects on a napkin to depict a shooting at a rally. He asked the man to help him hire assassins. Instead, he was introduced to undercover FBI agents who were secretly recording him, as had the acquaintance.
Merchant told the supposed hit men he needed services that could include killing “some political person” and paid them $5,000 in cash in a parked car in Manhattan.
“This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement released after the conviction.
Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, didn’t immediately reply to a message seeking comment.
Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, in Pakistan and Iran, and he sometimes visited the US for his garment business.
Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative about three years ago. The contact gave him countersurveillance training and assignments including the assassination scheme, Merchant said.
He maintained that he had to do his handler’s bidding to protect loved ones in Iran. The defendant said he reluctantly went through the motions but thought he’d be arrested and explain his situation to authorities before anyone was killed.
“I was going along with it,” he said, speaking in Urdu through a court interpreter.
Prosecutors emphasized that Merchant admitted taking steps to enact the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the US considers a foreign terrorist organization, and he didn’t proactively go to authorities.
Instead, he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the Butler gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
When Merchant subsequently spoke to FBI agents to explore the possibility of a cooperation agreement, he didn’t say he had acted out of fear for his family.
Prosecutors argued that he didn’t back up a defense of acting under duress. Merchant sought to persuade jurors he simply didn’t think the agents would believe him because they seemed to “think that I am some type of super-spy,” which he said he was “absolutely not.”
