KARACHI: A Pashtun-led group has announced protests across Pakistan later this week after a court acquitted 18 police officers accused of the 2018 killing of a Pashtun man in Karachi that triggered protests and launched a civil rights movement.
The killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud in January 2018 sparked nationwide peaceful demonstrations led by young ethnic Pashtuns from the country’s northwest who said they had long been the target of military operations, internal displacement, ethnic stereotyping and abductions by security forces, which they deny.
The protests developed into a larger socio-ethnic movement, the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, which continues to operate to date and campaigns for Pashtun rights.
On Monday, an anti-terrorism court in Karachi said the prosecution was unable to provide substantial evidence against Rao Anwar, a former senior superintendent of police in Karachi, and 17 other defendants accused of involvement in the “extrajudicial” killing of Mehsud. The court said the prosecution was unable to prove that Mehsud was kidnapped and subsequently shot in a “fake encounter” by Anwar and his team.
In this picture taken on April 6, 2018, Pakistani tribal leader of the Pashtun Protection Movement (PPM) Manzoor Pashteen takes part in an interview with AFP in Islamabad.
“The acquittal of Rao Anwar and his accomplices, the notorious murderer of hundreds of people including martyr Naqeebullah, is a cruel decision,” Manzoor Pashteen, the head of the PTM, said on Twitter.
“Protests will be held in every city and district on January 25, 2023, against this oppressive decision. And the lawyers of this case will challenge this decision in the [Sindh] high court.”
“Today’s judgment will be appealed before the Honorable High Court by the legal heirs of Naqeeb Mehsud,” Jibran Nasir, a rights activist and the lawyer representing the Mehsud family, said.
In a brief statement to the media after his acquittal, Rao said “God has given me success” in the “fabricated case.”
Most Pashtuns live in northwest Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan, divided by a colonial-era border that Afghanistan has never recognized.
The military has accused the PTM of being funded by foreign intelligence agencies - a veiled reference to old rival India and its Afghan allies - to stoke unrest in Pakistan’s Pashtun lands after the Pakistani army defeated Islamist militants there.
The PTM rejects the accusation, saying it is a grassroots movement working for the rights of Pashtun people, who it says suffered through years of conflict between the security forces and militants.
