LAHORE, Pakistan: Frenchman Julien Columeau came to Pakistan at the age of 30 as a humanitarian worker, but a knack for languages and love of books have made him one of the country’s most innovative Urdu novelists.
Writing mainly historical fiction with a prose described as vivid and forceful, critics say that Columeau, now 41, has injected fresh life into a scene considered to have grown stale.
His works have featured at the country’s most prominent literature festivals with three novels published and more in the pipeline.
Originally from Marseilles, Columeau left France to study Hindi in India in 1993, but quickly grew disillusioned with the “clerical” form of the language he was being made to learn and switched to Urdu two years later.
“I learned it on my own — by then I was conversant in Hindi so there was a book which was about how to transliterate Urdu to Hindi,” he told AFP.
“Then I was practising my reading. After about one year I was able to read books,” he said.
He later moved to Pakistan with the International Committee of the Red Cross where he worked primarily as a translator in troubled areas.
Columeau’s first Urdu short story, Zalzala, or “earthquake,” came out after the catastrophic quake of 2005 and was set between a girls’ school in Pakistani Kashmir and an apartment tower in Islamabad.
But it was when he turned his attention to Pakistan’s iconic 20th century poets that Columeau came into his own as an Urdu writer.
He became fascinated with 1950s poet Saghar Siddiqui, who fell into ruin and destitution and acquired a saint-like following among common people before his early death.
“I wanted to explore why he became a malang (a wandering mystic) despite the fact he was a successful poet and wrote songs for movies,” Columeau said of his first novel, “Saghar.”
“I used the gaps in his biography in order to construct my own fiction.”
His second book on vagabond street poet Mira Jee was positively reviewed by 90-year-old Intizar Husain, widely seen as the greatest living Urdu writer, who is hailed for his works around partition and the 10-year of Zia-ul-Haq.
Husain told AFP Columeau’s prose was a break from Urdu literature’s usual euphemistic style.
“His expression — it goes beyond what we normally say,” said Husain.
Over the past decade or so, Pakistani English-language writers have become increasingly prominent and have helped expose their country on the world stage with works like Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” — which became a Hollywood film — and Mohammed Hanif’s “A Case of Exploding Mangoes.”
Urdu is renowned for its beauty and poetry, but its literature has diminished in recent years and become primarily the domain of Pakistan’s less visible lower-middle classes.
French author pushes past boundaries — writing in Urdu
French author pushes past boundaries — writing in Urdu
Judge declares 4 men wrongly accused of 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent
- The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families
- Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999
TEXAS, USA: A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it for decades. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.
“All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,” Strassburger said.
The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.
Connection to a new suspect revealed
The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
