“She is not my ‘girl friend’, she’s my wife,” he told my editor belligerently.
I was thrilled. It was the first public admission that Jamali had made about his alleged connection to the missing girl. His surprising claim that Fauzia was his wife, while hardly believable, had become necessary. While a Muslim man could have four wives, having extramarital relations is punishable by death. He couldn’t refute the relationship since he had got Fauzia a job and room near the hospital.
Still, when Jamali called, he did not mention that his “wife” was missing or whether he had filed a missing report with police. Despite his influential position, he had made no move to find her. Instead, the man, driven by tribal instincts – as I later found him to be – had only expressed pompous annoyance that I had “soiled” his reputation by my choice of words. The timing of his phone call would be his first mistake.
Missing Girl was Murdered
On the morning of January 9, 1990, shepherds tending their flocks in the dusty wastelands along Karachi’s Super Highway stumbled upon the body of a young woman. They turned around the body, wrapped in an ajrak (a multi-purpose red Sindhi cloth), and saw that her eyes were shut. Her long tresses covered part of a bloodstained tunic, which she wore over a shalwar kameez and dupatta (baggy trousers and a scarf ).
The shepherds informed police, who in turn contacted Pakistan’s veteran social worker, Abdus Sattar Edhi. Edhi picked up the unclaimed body as a routine service to the city and buried her as an “unidentified girl.” The police lodged a routine First Information Report (FIR) of the murder against “unknown persons.” As was standard practice among local tabloids, a little-read Urdu newspaper then published a photograph of a dead girl with the caption, “unidentified young woman.”
None of us knew about the body that was found, nor had we seen the photograph in the newspaper. The photograph documented what we knew later – that Fauzia had been murdered between the nights of January 8 and 9. It definitively established that Fauzia was already dead when my paragraph connecting Jamali with the missing girl appeared in Dawn four days later.
Throughout January, Fauzia’s family had kept up hopes of finding the missing girl alive. Although her immediate family lived in Shikarpur – a good eight hours by road from Karachi – they became increasingly worried when a week went by and she failed to contact them. Fauzia’s father had passed away four years before, so the eldest son, Javed Bhutto came to Karachi to look for his sister.
Javed, who was eight years older than Fauzia, had recently returned to Pakistan with a master’s degree in philosophy from Sophia, Bulgaria. A slender, reflective man with a thick crop of hair, he was possessed with finding her. He searched for her at familiar haunts in Karachi, Hyderabad and Nawabshah, where she had worked or studied and asked friends and acquaintances where and with whom they had last seen her.
Apparently, the intense search for Fauzia by the Bhutto family and their supporters put pressure on Jamali to account for his whereabouts and his relationship with her. Being a lawyer, he did so with exacting detail.
In late January, desperate to find any trace of his missing sister, Javed broke the flimsy lock in his sister’s hostel room. Here, he discovered a hand-written note slipped under her door from Jamali. In it, he had written to Fauzia: “I met you on 8 January but had to go away on 9 and 10.” The note went on to explicitly mention the dates when he was out of town: 11, 12 and the 13 of that month.
Even then, although Fauzia was still counted as missing, Jamali’s mention of specific dates in what was a “casual” note made Javed even more suspicious. Having by then gathered sufficient evidence to tie Jamali with Fauzia’s disappearance, Javed named him in a First Information Report filed with police.
Javed also requested that his friend – the heavy built, amiable landowner from Shikarpur, Junaid Soomro – telephone Jamali and ask whether he had seen Fauzia. Junaid was a former-MPA from Shikarpur and his political connections made it easier for him to question the sitting member of Benazir’s government. Still, in a society where men and women do not associate freely, it was bold of Soomro to confront Jamali. There was an awkward pause as Soomro phoned Benazir’s party man to ask:
“So where is she?”
“No really, is she missing?” – Jamali feigned concern. Then in a reassuring tone, he told Soomro, “I’ll be coming to Karachi soon. We’ll look for her together.”
The two met at Soomro’s friend’s home in Karachi. Both men were accompanied by their political supporters. There, Jamali showed Soomro a nikah nama (marriage contract) in order to prove that Fauzia was his “wife.” Although it was a planned move, it failed to convince the audience. Instead, astonished at the marriage document, Soomro instinctively told Jamali, “That’s a fake piece of paper.”
There were others in the room that witnessed Jamali recoil and fall silent. Tactfully, Soomro brought the conversation back to the central issue and said emphatically: “What is important is to find out is where she is right now.”
Javed continued to look for his sister, still believing her to be alive. All of his questions elicited answers that pointed toward Jamali. Weeks flew by. Then one late evening a close friend of Javed’s, Agha Rafiq – who had helped him hunt for Fauzia – showed him an old crumpled Urdu newspaper. It was the local tabloid with the blurred picture of a dead girl, which, until now, had gone unnoticed.
Rafiq had received the tabloid from Fauzia’s colleague, a young woman named Munnawar Sultana. She seemed scared and hesitant as she told him that Jamali had asked that the newspaper, dated January 9, be shown to her family. Apparently, Jamali figured that the family’s hunt for Fauzia – which was now all over the newspapers in Pakistan – must end. Javed stared at the dim photograph and knew it was his missing sister.
With a sickening feeling Javed felt the world come crashing down around him. The bitter reality sank in. He knew he would never see his sister again. A silence descended in the room as his men friends saw him struggle with the news. They comforted him as best as they could.
As morning broke, the victim’s brother collected himself. With his close friends by his side, he went to meet the veteran social worker Abdus Sattar Edhi, who had buried Fauzia as an “unidentified girl.”
I knew Edhi from the mid ‘80s as the white bearded man dressed simply in long tunic and baggy trousers, who arrived at every emergency in his rickety ambulance. He tended victims with compassion, regardless of race, religion and ethnicity. At times, we were the only two people at a conflict zone. I caught his surprised expression as he looked at me – the only the woman reporter on the scene. Without saying a word, he would lift the dead and wounded and drive them off to hospital.
Today, Edhi is a household name in Pakistan, with a host of international offices. Over time, he has built a network of social services through public donations that surpass the level of government assistance to the poor, sick and wounded.
At the Edhi center, the man with the flowing white beard greeted Javed with a heavy heart. Taking him back to his desk, he laid out the photographs of Fauzia that were taken shortly before her burial. It confirmed the young man’s worst fears. The post-mortem report obtained by Javed from the government-run Abbasi Shaheed Hospital in Karachi revealed bullet wounds. Fauzia Bhutto’s disappearance was confirmed as a homicide.
Javed was taken to the graveyard where Fauzia had been buried anonymously by the veteran social worker. The body was later exhumed and buried in the family’s hometown of Shikarpur.
There was no doubt in Javed’s mind as to who had killed his sister. He now turned his complete efforts to bringing the killer to justice. Within 24 hours, he had lodged a police report that named MPA Rahim Baksh Jamali as the suspect.
Fauzia’s Murder Makes Waves
The young woman’s murder made headlines in national newspapers and reverberated through society. Fauzia was unusual in that she came from a provincial town in Sindh, but had developed an independent career. With her vibrant
and lively nature, she was hugely popular in her social circles. Even though newspaper readers in Karachi were hardened by reports of daily violence, many were shocked by her brutal murder.
Fauzia’s murder affected me more than I cared to express. It angered me that a well-connected, influential man had ruthlessly cut down a young woman in the prime of her life and then summarily discarded her body. Without even knowing her, I felt emotionally linked to this woman seven years younger than me.
There was a stigma attached to women working in a society that presumes that their place is at home. But it was also symbolic of the manner in which the feudal society treats women: as sexual objects and disposable commodities.
I argued endlessly with my parents about the injustice of the murder. My father prudishly maintained that a young woman had no business having an affair with a married man. He always warned us about the cruelty of Sindhi feudals and shuddered at the thought of his daughters getting involved. My mother put herself in the shoes of the deceased girl’s mother and grieved for the family.
Being a reporter in an influential newspaper gave me an outlet to fight injustice. It was an opportunity that other women did not have. I had just emerged from writing a series of articles, seeking justice for two nurses raped at gunpoint in a government hospital. Now, I felt that my readers – especially women – again looked toward me. We knew full well that the administration would never act unless pressured.
Meanwhile, rumors cropped up that the murder was ethnically based; that it was the ethnic group, MQM, which had killed the Sindhi girl. Indeed, I had received a phone call from my early contact – the Urdu-speaking woman doctor whose room was taken over by Fauzia. Almost in tears, she told me that Jamali had accused her in front of the hospital director of conniving with the MQM to get rid of Fauzia.
“That scoundrel is behind her disappearance, but he’s trying to throw off the blame and convert this to an ethnic issue,” she told me.
The PPP government, which struggled with a poor media image, initially resisted the attempt to interrogate a high profile member of their party. As is normal in Pakistan, an influential person like Jamali was exempted from police questioning because of his status as a member of the Sindh assembly.
Instead, the Sindh police hauled up Jamali’s driver, Mohammed Ishaq – a poor, thin straggly son of a peasant, who normally kept his eyes glued to the ground. As his driver was hauled up in police custody for questioning, Jamali grew increasingly desperate. I saw the effect.
One day, with the matter of Fauzia’s murder still red hot, the door to the reporter’s room creaked. I looked up to see a beak-nosed man with shifty eyes make a beeline for my desk. Without waiting for an invitation, he pulled up a chair by my desk and introduced himself as Dr Abdul Karim Jamali, a resident doctor at JPMC. His manner indicated he knew my role in reporting Fauzia’s murder and he began trying to convince me that Jamali was innocent and the ethnic group, MQM was to blame.
I was intrigued to hear the younger Jamali defend his tribesman and blame the MQM instead. My expression stayed skeptical. I knew that Dr Karim had managed to gather a handful of supporters to publicly implicate the MQM and plant rumors – even organize a demonstration against the ethnic party at the affiliated Sindh Medical College. Their demands chalked on the college walls had read, “Arrest the real killers of Fauzia.”
I took this impromptu meeting as an opportunity to ask the younger Jamali point blank: “What proof do you have that the MQM is behind Fauzia’s murder?” The younger Jamali’s expression became even more sphinx-like. Despite my Sindhi background, he knew there was no way I would support him on ethnic grounds. He was now spinning a yarn, telling me that everyone knew that the MQM was behind every violent incident in Karachi. And yet, his failure to give a single name or motive made him unconvincing. I could see that he had no evidence.
The accused next turned to the press for his defense. Even as the police interrogated his driver, a report appeared on the front page of the influential Sindhi newspaper – Hilal-i-Pakistan – that it was the MQM who had raped and killed Fauzia.
The article by a “staff reporter” cited Fauzia’s murder as only one in a chain of atrocities that the MQM had committed against Sindhi women. Appearing at a time when Sindhis and Mohajirs were already at each other’s throats, the widely circulated newspaper effectively incited Sindhis to rise up and avenge Fauzia’s murder.
The news item threatened to foment rivers of blood between Mohajirs and Sindhis. It even embarrassed the PPP government. The soft-spoken chief minister of Sindh from Shikarpur Aftab Shahban Mirani, who struggled to keep order amidst violent ethnic disturbances, investigated its origin. He found it had emanated, not unsurprisingly from the panicked Jamali himself.
But before Jamali could escape under the cover of ethnic riots, Javed Bhutto empathically quashed the inflammatory report that the MQM was responsible for Fauzia’s murder. Javed’s statement – which appeared in the English, Urdu and Sindhi press – claimed that the murder was the handiwork of a suspect whose name would shortly be released by police.
I saw Javed for the first time when he walked into my office to contradict the Sindhi newspaper’s report. Looking up from my desk, my gaze was drawn by the slender, lanky unselfconscious youth. He seemed driven by a sense of purpose. The young man, with male friends in tow, did not turn around to look at us – or at me, the only female reporter. Instead, as he walked straight to the city editor’s room, his sober intent struck a chord in me. I was impressed that the young man was focused on achieving justice.
Accused Member of Parliament Runs Away
At this critical juncture, the Inspector General of Sindh Police, Afzal Shigri called reporters to announce the findings, based on a confession by Jamali’s driver. Police told the press conference that the driver had confessed in front of a magistrate that on January 8, he and Jamali picked up Fauzia from the hospital and took her to an apartment complex in Clifton – Al Habib arcade. The apartment belonged to a male relative of Jamali.
According to the driver’s testimony, shortly after arriving with Fauzia, Jamali left the house to meet his relative. Fauzia went to the kitchen where she boiled eggs.
Jamali returned about an hour later. Inside the apartment, the driver heard arguments between the two from an adjoining room. Moments later, he was startled by the sound of gunfire. He looked into the bedroom, where he saw Jamali holding a gun while Fauzia lay bleeding on the carpet. Jamali turned the gun and threatened to kill the driver if he told anyone he had witnessed the scene.
In this gruesome testimony, the driver said he helped Jamali drape the dead girl in an ajrak, loaded the body in the trunk of his vehicle and drove to the fastest get-away for criminals – the deserted super highway. Some 12 years later, police discovered American journalist Daniel Pearl’s body in a shallow grave along the same highway.
Back in the 1990s, when ethnic disturbances were a daily occurrence in Karachi, vehicles were stopped at police check-posts. However, Jamali’s government license plate allowed his car to pass without detection. Drawing up to the highway near Gadap, the driver confessed that he and Jamali threw the young woman’s body into the desert wastelands before they sped off to Nawabshah in interior Sindh.
The Sindh police chief privately disclosed to Javed that he was resisting intense pressure from some members of the ruling PPP government against arresting one of their own. That was predictable. In Pakistan, legislators routinely use their clout to bend the arm of the law. A phone call from an influential politician to a police officer often frees accused persons from custody.
But as newspapers reported the evidence against the PPP parliamentary member, women, doctors and political and human rights groups mounted intense pressure for his arrest. The small but determined women’s groups in Karachi were enraged at the manner in which a male politician – who had roots in tribalism and feudal arrogance – could treat life with so little respect and expect to get away with it.
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sp; And yet, in a lawless society like Pakistan – where politicians, police, judiciary and the press are tarred with corruption – that is exactly what Jamali tried to do. He ran away.
Seemingly overnight, taking a few possessions, Jamali disappeared. We suspected that high-ranking officials within the PPP had tipped him off about his imminent arrest. And so he chose to flee when he could.
In Jamali’s absence, police took over his apartment in Clifton, Al-Habib Arcade. They discovered the carpet and the mattress where Fauzia was murdered. Although the blood-stained mattress had been meticulously scrubbed, stains were visible on the underside. Forensic experts confirmed the stains matched the blood found on Fauzia’s clothes during the autopsy.
A police team was dispatched to Jamali’s hometown in Nawabshah to recover his licensed gun and the car used for the murder. These items would never be found. Jamali was later found to have sold his car to a dealer in the tribal areas, where no one could trace it. It was clear to us that the PPP MPA could not have acted without the help of his “friends” in government. Over a month had passed since Fauzia’s murder and the sole accused from Benazir’s party was nowhere to be found.
While covering the Sindh Assembly on my regular beat, I seized on the opportunity to confront PPP Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah as he addressed a regular press briefing on the law and order situation in Sindh.
The short, thin and balding party loyalist had won a landslide victory in Khairpur, which I had visited a year ago. Now, I asked him, in his capacity as chief minister, how long his party man and fellow parliamentarian could remain absconding for murder. Pen in hand, my fellow journalists sat poised to note his response. Shah pursed his lips and frowned, as he did whenever he grew thought hard. Looking at me in the eye, he said that police had been directed to arrest Jamali wherever he was hiding.
Aboard the Democracy Train Page 15