KARACHI: The Sindh wildlife department on Thursday ordered to confiscate four lions and two tigers, kept as pets by a resident of Karachi and seen roaming freely in a compound, a senior official said on Wednesday.
Keeping wild cats as pets is not uncommon in Pakistan, where wealthy businessmen have been known to operate private zoos and sometimes parade the animals for the public.
Media reported panic and alarm among citizens of the port city’s Gulshan-e-Hadeed area on Tuesday night after they saw the animals uncaged and roaming freely within a compound.
“I have ordered to confiscate the animals and shift them to Karachi Zoo for 45 days. The owner of the animals may auction them during this period. If he doesn’t do it, however, they will become the property of the zoo,” Javed Ahmed Mahar, conservator of the Sindh Wildlife Department, told Arab News after passing the order in the capacity of a magistrate.
The order noted that the “act of possessing ‘Big Cats’ without the ‘Certificate of Lawful Possession’ was bad in the eyes of Law” and keeping dangerous animals in a residential area “could put lives of people at great risk.”
“As requested by the owner during the proceedings and keeping in view the financial aspect of this case and to save the owner from heavy financial losses, he has been provided with a chance during this period [of 45 days] to publish an advertisement in newspapers for the sale of lions through open auction,” the order read, adding that the owner would pay the feeding expenses to the Karachi Zoo, though the animal sanctuary would not take any rental or other charges.
Speaking to Arab News on Thursday, Mahar said the owner of the animals, Zuhaib Ali, had presented an expired license before the department this morning, adding that the license only gave permission to maintain a mini-zoo with birds and herbivores, not dangerous animals like lions and tigers. The license also did not apply to Ali’s area of residence, the conservator added.
Ali told Arab News one lion had come out of its cage when a janitor went in to clean it but was immediately put back in.
“These are my pet animals which I have adopted since these were two-months old, they cannot harm anyone,” Ali said, adding that he believed he had all necessary documentation allowing him to keep the animals in any area with thirty-feet high boundary walls.
“These are like my children,” Ali said. “If these are freed in the wild, they will die.”
In 2017, police in Pakistan arrested a man who took his pet lion for a night-time drive through the streets of the bustling city of Karachi after video of the incident went viral on social media.
In 2015, a pet lioness gave birth to five cubs in the central city of Multan, media said at the time.
Wildlife department confiscates pet lions, tigers from Karachi resident
https://arab.news/j2c7w
Wildlife department confiscates pet lions, tigers from Karachi resident
- Media reported panic among Gulshan-e-Hadeed residents on Tuesday after they saw the animals roaming freely within a compound
- Owner Zuhaib Ali says he has raised the imported pets since they were two months old, “they cannot harm anyone”
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.”
